INSPECTORS at the Bureau of Standards are investigating complaints that Jamaica’s sugar producers are selling sugar mixed with stones, bolts, nails, “and a whole lot of stuff”.

Some of the island’s bakers — themselves under a spotlight for quality-control problems — made the complaints, according to Gladstone Rose, the bureau’s manager of standards, who is leading the investigation.

In response, the Bureau of Standards is requiring the island’s eight sugar producers to undergo an immediate re-registration process — even if it is not yet time to undergo the annual registration, Rose said yesterday. The process requires visits by inspectors, he said, during an interview.

“We are going in and looking at the standards,” including sanitary conditions, he said. Inspectors started the registration examinations this week, and (they) should be concluded by next week,” he said.

The bakers complained that they were getting the bad sugar from the four sugar producers that sell domestically, Rose said.

“They (say they) are finding extraneous matter in the sugar like stones, bolts, nails — a whole lot of stuff.

“They brought us some samples to show us, but we can’t say, at this moment, if it came from these factories.”

Rose said another source for the allegedly contaminated sugar might be “persons unknown, bagging it under unsanitary conditions, and selling it” on the black market, “in which case the purchasers only would have themselves to blame”.

Rose noted that the bakers who complained about the contaminated sugar had quality-control problems of their own, which caught the bureau’s attention three years ago.

“We have been working with the Bakers Association of Jamaica, and one year ago, we agreed on some deadlines for them to put in certain measures…and it was during this time that we got the complaints about the contaminated sugar”, Rose said.