The municipality here closed last week an unlicensed store located in a house in the center of Al-Qurayyat district which was used for repackaging and distributing expired food and produce “not fit for human consumption”. Upon raiding the house, officials found expired white cheese, rotten Brazilian meat, date stamps, plastic bags and other materials used for packaging food items. “We received a call from a resident living in the district informing the municipality that Arab workers were using the house to repackage expired and contaminated food. The workers would stamp the repackaged food with new expiry dates and then distribute it to groceries and markets in the district,” Dr. Basheer Abo Najem, head of the licensing department at Jeddah municipality, told Saudi Gazette. He added that upon receiving the complaint, the municipality immediately created a special committee consisting of officials of Al-Jami'ah mayoralty and Al-Nozlatain police department which raided the location and caught the illegal workers in the act of repackaging the expired, contaminated food. “We found and confiscated 30 large metal containers of white cheese, 10 kilos of butter and 40 kilos of pastrama, a kind of local pastrami made “with meat, olives and cucumbers”, Abo Najem said. Saleh Al-Homeed, head of the municipality's trade monitoring department, said that the committee found different kinds of packaging material, such as plastic bags used to package the white cheese. “The place was completely unhygienic and without any ventilation. The mayoralty confiscated the food, closed the store and turned those involved over to the appropriate authorities,” he added.