Rwanda Bureau of Standards(RBS) will sample all cooking oil products in the market to ascertain their quality and edible content standards. The move comes after  the institution’s tested a Kenyan cooking oil brand "Salaam Cooking Oil” which revealed that the brand did not conform to RBS quality standards.

The director of Quality Assurance unit at the RBS Philip Nzaire to Business Times that the five cooking oil brands retailing at the market, "Salama Cooking  Oil”, "Raha Fry”, "Fresh Fry” and "Top Fry” would be subjected to further laboratory tests to see whether they conform to the set standards.

The standards body publicist Simeon Kwizera said that appropriate action would be
taken by RBS on sub-standard products sold in the local markets.

"We intend to take appropriate action including banning such products found to be sub-standard. What we will do in such a case will be to notify our counterpart body, in this case, Kenya Bureau of Standards to also take similar action,” he noted.

Kwizera added that in a situation, where such banned products are certified by the regional East African Standards body before entering Rwanda, RBS would immediately seek to ban such a product at the regional level.

Asked to respond to why other bodies certify products that are later on banned in Rwanda, RBS said many conditions such as storage and transportation could lead to a loss of standards of a particular product.

"Certification of products and services is a process and regular quality inspection is required to ensure that standards are maintained and normally certification has a particular period of time; there is a certification contract between us and the producer so in the midway, standards could be lost”, he said.

Kwizera added that they were committed to ensuring that Rwandans get quality and standard products through the maintenance of  the current credibility levels
they have enjoyed in the regional market for being strict on standards and quality.

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