The Health Ministry’s Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) says it has intercepted pumpkin seed oil with carcinogenic benzopyrene concentrations exceeding regulatory limits. The announcement came on Tuesday, August 4, and follows a recent scandal in which benzopyrene has been found in several batches of cooking oil produced by the Central Union Oil Corporation.

The TFDA said that the shipment of pumpkin seed oil imported by raw material supplier HealthTake from Austria contained 2.5 micrograms per kilogram of benzopyrene, exceeding the regulatory limit of 2.0 micrograms. The TFDA has ordered the entire shipment of 4.5 kilograms returned or destroyed.

TFDA’s Northern Taiwan Management Center Director Liu Fang-ming (劉芳銘) said that inspection procedures for HealthTake have been changed to batch-by-batch basis with the sampling rate of 100%. TFDA has also implemented enhanced batch sampling inspections for related oil products through December 31, with a sampling rate of 20% to 50%.