Food Standards Agency
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More Hershey's cookies withdrawn

The Agency has issued an updated Allergy Alert, because a second Hershey’s Chocolate Reeses Cookies product might contain peanuts that are not mentioned on the label. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Dipped Reeses Cookies bought on, or after, 2 August from Selfridges stores have been withdrawn because the product is a possible health risk for anyone who is allergic to peanuts.

Anyone who has an allergy to peanuts is advised to not eat this product.

The original alert, about Hershey’s Chocolate Reeses Cookies (56g) bought on or after 2 August 2009 from www.ocado.com being withdrawn, was issued on 22 October and can be found at the link below.

Product details

The affected products are:

  • Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Dipped Reeses Cookies, 255g
  • products purchased between 2 August 2009 and 23 October 2009
  • only sold by Selfridges stores
  • Hershey’s Chocolate Reeses Cookies, 56g
  • products purchased between 2 August 2009 and 22 October 2009
  • only sold online by the Ocado website

Empire Food Brokers Ltd, the UK distributor of the cookies, has withdrawn the affected products from sale. In addition, the company will be contacting the relevant allergy support organisations, which will tell their members of the withdrawal.

No other Hershey’s products are known to be affected.

Full refund from Selfridges
Point of sale notices will be displayed in Selfridges stores, explaining to customers the reason for the withdrawal. Anyone who has bought the affected product can return it for a full refund.

Full refund from Ocado
All customers who have bought the affected product from the Ocado website are being contacted to be provided with an explanation as to why the product has been withdrawn from sale, and, if they have bought this product, how they can get a refund.

Allergy alerts

Sometimes there will be a problem with a food product that means it should not be sold. Then it might be 'withdrawn' (taken off the shelves) or 'recalled' (when customers are asked to return the product). Sometimes foods have to be withdrawn or recalled if there is a risk to consumers because the allergy labelling is missing or incorrect or if there is any other food allergy risk.

In such situations the Agency will issue an Allergy Alert. It is also possible to subscribe to an email alert system to receive automatic messages whenever Allergy Alerts are issued. Click on 'Get alerts' in the box at the bottom of this page to find more details.

You can get details of all the latest allergy alerts as soon as they're issued by getting the details sent as a SMS text message direct to your mobile phone.

To sign up to this free service, simply send the text message 'START ALLERGY' to the number 62372. To unsubscribe, just text 'STOP ALLERGY' to the same number.

You can also subscribe to our Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed for food and allergy alerts. RSS is a format for distributing news content and is a simple way to keep up to date with the latest news on a website. When we publish via RSS, you can automatically get the updated content via a 'news aggregator' or 'news reader'. Our RSS feed will contain a brief summary and link back to our web content. Click on ‘What is RSS’ on the left of this page for more details.

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