When officials from the Ministry for Primary Industries visited the four North Islanders diagnosed with hepatitis A in the frozen berry food safety scare, two still had Fruzio berries in their freezer which have since tested negative for hepatitis A.
"The four patients here all ate Fruzio berries so ours was the one consistent but they also ate other berry brands," said Mike Glover, the owner of FSL Foods which imports the fruit under the Fruzio label.
The batches are believed to have arrived in New Zealand and hit supermarket shelves sometime in late August or early September. The incubation period for the hepatitis A virus is between 15 and 50 days.
Glover said if the MPI thought thought his fruit was the source, it should recall all fruit imported from China's Shandong province.
Earlier this year, 18 people in Australia contracted hepatitis A from frozen berries grown in Chile and China and packaged in China's Shandong Province. But Glover says this is the only link between his bags of frozen strawberries and blackberries and the four cases of hepatitis here.
"There wasn't any direct evidence other than a link to the Shandong Province which is about 20 times bigger in landmass than the upper North Island. It's a huge area producing 80 per cent of the country's strawberries a year- about 120,000 tonnes."
Glover said the distance between the Chinese factory involved in the Australian cases and the Fruzio factory is 500 kilometres.
MPI director of plants, food and environment Peter Thomson said investigations had not yet revealed a specific cause of the hepatitis cases but recent outbreaks in other countries suggested the frozen berry link. He said investigations were ongoing and he did not rule out recalls of other products.
