A Shanghai court on Monday imposed fines totaling 2.4 million yuan ($364,780) on two food processing plants of a global fast food chain supplier and sentenced 10 people to jail for producing and selling substandard products in a case exposed in 2014.
The Shanghai and Hebei branches of Husi Food Co. were each ordered to pay 1.2 million yuan in fines for using recycled meat in their products, according to a report from Shanghai Daily.
Husi Food Co. is a subsidiary of the U.S.-based global food processing firm OSI Group, whose former clients include McDonald's and Yum! Brands' KFC and Pizza Hut.
Yang Liqun, an OSI China executive in charge of its deep processing division and an Australian citizen, was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 100,000 yuan, the Shanghai Daily reported. She also faces deportation.
Nine more people were given prison terms of up to 2 years and 8 months and fines ranging from 30,000 to 80,000 yuan. Four were given suspended sentences.
The case made headlines in July 2014 after a local TV station reported Shanghai Husi had supplied products containing reprocessed, expired meat to several fast food chains and restaurants across China.
After the report was aired, six senior executives were arrested and the group ceased all operations at Shanghai Husi.
Court documents indicated that between May and June 2013, Yum! Brands returned products produced by Husi's Shanghai and Hebei plants as they failed to comply with Yum! quality standards.
Husi then decided to use the returned and expired products to produce other food items, the document revealed.
Internal communications, including emails, further showed that the senior executives gave their consent to add recycled and expired meat to the company's products.
The recycled meat was used in meat patties as well as in chicken and beef products, court documents show.
The court ruled that Yang Liqun gave the order to Husi's Shanghai and Hebei plants to use the tainted products.
Law enforcement officials told the state-owned Xinhua News Agency that, upon hearing of the investigation, senior executives and other key personnel deleted emails that implicated them in the scandal.
Under China's Food Safety Law, recycled and expired ingredients are banned for use in food products.
During the trial, the defendants argued that the products returned by Yum! were not recycled and that the dates stamped on the packaging were a guide for clients and not "use by" dates.
The court, however, said that the products were recycled as defined in law and that the expiration dates cannot be changed once it is set.
The two Husi branches and the 10 defendants should be held accountable as they broke the Food Safety Law, Xu Wei, the judge presiding over the case, told Xinhua in an interview.