Cadbury's in new health scare

Supermarkets removed thousands of Easter eggs from shelves after the manufacurer, Cadbury, failed to label them as dangerous to people with nut allergies.

The company last night issued public warnings to customers about the recall of selected Easter eggs, Mini Creme Eggs and Milk Buttons Easter Chicks.

The move comes just two months after the company revealed that last year's salmonella scare had cost it £30m. In June last year seven product lines and more than a million chocolate bars were taken off the shelves because of potential contamination at one of Cadbury's main factories in Herefordshire.

After that, sales of chocolate bars such as Dairy Milk plummeted, and Cadbury Schweppes's chief executive admitted in December that it had been a "challenging" year.

Yesterday the company recalled thousands of eggs because they did not carry warnings that they may contain nuts. Cadbury refused to speculate on how much this latest scare might cost the company. It said its priority was to protect nut-allergy sufferers. It estimated the number of eggs recalled was likely to be in the thousands rather than the millions because the problem had affected only a few specific product lines.