¡¡¡¡BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhuanet) -- Haagen-Dazs, the world's top ice-cream brand, has apologized to consumers for its substandard operation in Shenzhen city, South China, where a small workshop without any sanitation permit was found to be its ice-cream cake supplier, the Beijing News reported Sunday.

    "We'd like to apologize to consumers for what happens in our Shenzhen company. We'll beef up management and go on offering consumers fine-quality products and services," Zhu Xi, general manager of Haagen-Dazs's China, was quoted as saying.

    According to the report, the American company's Shenzhen branchwas found on Thursday last week to use a tiny workshop with no sanitation permit to make ice-cream cakes for all the five franchised stores in the city.

    Four workers work in turn on two shifts in the three-room workshop, where the toilet is just next door to a food processing room and a trash can is placed right beside the roaster.

    Local industrial and commercial administration officials said it was very hard to guarantee the quality of food processed here given the sanitary conditions.

    The processing site should be kept 25 meters from the contamination sources like a toilet and workers are strictly required to disinfect themselves and wear respirators and gloves, which are not fulfilled in the workshop, they acknowledged.

    They also discovered that the sanitation permit produced by a Haagen-Dazs staff was not for the workshop, but somewhere else.

    "Moreover, such a vital production site has no sanitation permit at all. We'll not issue a permit under such production conditions," said an official surnamed Yu with the sanitation supervision bureau of Luohu district, where the workshop was located.

    All Haagen-Dazs ice-cream cakes in the workshop were then disposed of and the place sealed up by the bureau.

    Zhu Xi owed the incident to "negligence of management" as they thought that the sanitation permit they produced could be used at this workshop.

    He said the workshop or "kitchen" also exist in Beijing and Shanghai.

    But he said customers who buy or order an ice-cream cake can get refund by presenting their receipt at a Haagen-Dazs store.

    The incident seems not to have any impact on Haagen-Dazs's branches in Beijing, where local staff promised their products come "definitely from normal channels" and referred to their business as "normal".

    Zhu Xi said the "central kitchen" or production distribution center in Beijing cost the company 600,000 million US dollars to build in 1999 and can ensure product quality.

    Haagen-Dazs, which originated from the United States in the early 1920s, entered the Chinese mainland market in 1996, where it now had 48 branches. Enditem