Past food

For a Malaysian family, the lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic was favorable.

Getting confined at home was an opportunity to start a business, and it turned out to be more lucrative than the day jobs that were hard to keep because of travel restrictions and unstable incomes.

Raudhah Hassan’s family in Jemapoh, 120 kilometers south of the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, decided to sell homemade pizza.

They originally planned to earn just enough to cover their daily needs, but their Jemapoh pizza were a hit among customers and are now selling like hotcakes.

Hassan, 35, the eldest of several siblings and the mastermind behind the business, even had to hire 20 neighbors to help family members make 800 pizzas a day in their makeshift kitchen. Their pizza is simply made with dough, herbs and spices and pineapples mixed with meat or tuna on top of a heavy layer of mozzarella and cheddar cheese.

But not all pizzas are as delicious as Jemapoh’s like a box of Celeste Pizza recently sold at the West Hollywood Ralphs supermarket in California, USA.

A customer from Beverly Hills bought a frozen pepperoni pizza online and had it delivered by Instacart. Agneta Yilmaz, 78, intended the order as a treat for her 4-year-old granddaughter but she was disappointed when she opened it.

The pizza was completely brown and smelled foul. When Yilmaz checked the box, she was shocked to know that the pizza was already expired.

Yilmaz called Ralphs to complain, and she was told that the company is stepping up efforts to ensure all food products on its shelves are fresh. Kroger, which owns the supermarket, also ordered the manager of the store to have everything removed from the freezers and for all expiration dates to be examined.

Danko Turcic, an associate professor of operations and supply chain management at UC Riverside, blamed Ralphs for the expired pizza saying it failed to monitor its inventory and discard expired items.

Turcic also blamed Instacart for not checking expiration dates of items it buys for a customer, but the delivery service provider said it instructs shoppers to examine the expiration dates of products they select.

Meanwhile, Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, said it was odd for Yilmaz to get an expired pizza and wondered how it got in the supermarket.

Yilmaz and her granddaughter were fortunate not to eat the pizza, which expired last 12 December 2017.