Smuggled Ensure milk with fake labels discovered

An Ensure milk can with a fake blue label (L) and another can with a real yellow label.

The fake labels are blue because Ensure milk with blue labels is more expensive.

At 8/358 Phan Chu Trinh Street, the police caught the house’s owner, Ton Nu Cam Dung, replacing labels among authentic Ensure milk products stored there.

The police seized 5,208 cans with yellow labels, 1,680 with blue labels and 505 without labels.

They also detected 50 cartons of Ensure cans, including those whose yellow labels had been replaced with blue ones, and those without labels.

In the house at 35 Nguyen Thien Thuat street, owned by Nguyen Van Sanh, the police also seized 60 cartons containing cans and plastic bottles of Ensure milk.

In the third house, 95 Tran Nguyen Dan, the police detected 720 blue plastic bottles of Ensure (237 ml). Like Sanh, Nguyen Van Be, the house’s owner, failed to show the police any documents to prove the origin of the milk.

All these people told investigators that they had been hired by a man named Nguyen Khoi Tin, 32, from Ho Chi Minh City, to replace the yellow labels of milk products with the blue ones for VND3,000-4,000 ($0.14-0.19) per carton since November 2011.

The label replacement was done manually and fake blue labels had been provided to Tin by a man named Phong, also from Ho Chi Minh City, they said.

They also said Tin had bought 2.4 million fake blue labels for VND900 per label from Phong and transported them to Hue for use.

The substitutions were made since the price of Ensure milk with blue labels is higher than that of those with yellow labels. In addition, consumers prefer Ensure milk with blue labels to that with yellow labels, police said.

Initial investigation results showed that Tin had bought Ensure milk from Minh Dat Phu One Member Co Ltd in Danang city.

Tin then hired a man named Nguyen Van Hung, residing at 13/6 Cua Trai, Hue City, to transport the milk to these above-mentioned address for label replacement.

The milk products with fake labels were later sold to the market in Hue.

Most of the 10,000 milk cans had been smuggled from Thailand and brought into Vietnam illegally via border gates in Tay Ninh and Quang Tri Provinces. They were later transported to Ho Chi Minh City, said senior lieutenant colonel Vo Van Sau, deputy head of Hue Police.

Phan Van Thanh, deputy head of the Thua Thien-Hue Province Market Management Sub-department said the agency has yet to detect fake Ensure milk in the province so far this year.

Meanwhile, Fake Ensure milk had been discovered at a company in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 11 in last April, local authorities said.

On April 14, in a document issued to Hue City Police, American firm Abbott Laboratories S.A’s representative office in the second city said the company had supplied only one of its products to the Vietnamese market, 237-ml Ensure Gold Vigor, which is in liquid form in bottles and with vanilla favor.

This product has been registered with Vietnam's Ministry of Health’s Food Hygiene and Safety Department and has been distributed exclusively by 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Co Ltd, located at 72-74 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, District 3, Ho Chi Minh City.

Vu Gia Khuyen, director of the company, said his company distributed the said Ensure Gold Vigor, of US origin, and another Ensure milk product, which is in liquid form in 250-ml cans and is imported from the Netherlands.

The company is not responsible for the quality of any Ensure products that do not originate from these two countries, Khuyen said.