Dadu's Mithai Vatika, a popular sweet shop in Secunderabad, was ordered to pay Rs 65,420 to one of its customers, after selling stale food past the expiry date.
The fine was ordered by the Hyderabad consumer forum after an Adliabad resident, Kamal Kishore, filed a complaint.
According to the complainant, he bought several sweets worth around Rs 6,000 for his daughter's engagement function from Dadu's Secunderabad outlet in February this year.
However, those who consumed the sweets began suffering from diarrhoea, following which they realised that the expiry date was January 27.
Kishore, in his complaint said that he had to buy another batch of fresh food from Adilabad at a cost of Rs 10,000 and also told the forum that the sweet shop failed to address his concern.
The forum sent a sample of the food to the State Food Laboratory (SFL) in Hyderabad, to look into the allegations.
The SFL observed that the food was injurious to health and marked it 'unsafe' for consumption.
According to media reports, a representative of the food outlet said that sweets from the shop were bought by individual buyers as well as corporate companies and state government offices, with no other customer during the same time period complaining of any health problems.
The food outlet also claimed that the customer was trying to damage its reputation.
"Having sold stale eatable items, also chudwa and other eatable items emitting foul smell to the complainant, there is a deficiency of service on the part of the (sweet shop)," the forum ruled.
According to the company’s website, Rajesh Dadu, the founder of Dadu’s Mithai Vatika, spent his initial sweet-making years in Bengaluru before moving to Hyderabad and setting up a shop at Himayatnagar in 1993.
In 2003, Rajesh Dadu started an outlet at Secunderabad. A third store was opened again a decade later at Jubilee Hills in 2013 and a fourth store was started at Banjara Hills in June 2015.