The ¥7 'Gout Candy' That Sold for ¥598: China's First Drug-Waste Food Scandal
A candy sold to gout patients as a 'miraculous' sugar-pill substitute contained the industrial waste byproduct of a prescription drug, Chinese regulators revealed. It is the first time the substance has ever been detected in food — and a window into the cat-and-mouse game of modern food fraud.
The product looks like a harmless supplement: a pressed candy marketed under a long ingredient list of marine-fish peptides and turmeric, promised to treat gout with near-miraculous effect. A Hangzhou man, identified only as Xiao Zhou, bought two boxes for 1,196 yuan after years of living with gout, drawn in by customer-service staff who said it could directly replace his prescription medication. Two weeks later his urine was yellow and foamy and his heart was doing strange things. He filed a report with regulators.
What the investigation found is one of the more striking cases of food fraud in recent Chinese memory, and the first of its kind. The candy contained non-buridate impurity K — a manufacturing waste byproduct of the prescription gout drug febuxostat, never before detected in food. It is, essentially, the industrial tailings of a real medicine: a chemical that is banned from food entirely, and that can damage the liver and kidneys over time.
The scale of the operation is the part that turned the story into a national talking point. Each box of the candy, marketed under the name "Melisen marine-fish oligopeptide turmeric pressed candy," cost about 7.48 yuan to make. It left the factory at 60 yuan, hit retail at 598 — a markup of nearly 80 times, with the manufacturer raking in the difference between a cheap food product and a desperate patient's faith.
What makes the case chilling rather than merely greedy is the sophistication. According to the CCTV investigation, the manufacturer, a licensed food company in Guangzhou called Kangmai Valley, deliberately ran night shifts, shipped products the moment they were made, and kept no inventory. When raided, production records had already been wiped; investigators recovered 133 internal forms from two servers marked "do not touch." Those records revealed the key tell: a raw material labeled "fruit and vegetable powder" whose purchase price was more than 6,000 yuan per kilogram — far too expensive for any actual fruit and vegetable powder, but exactly consistent with a batch laced with the impurity.
The company had tested the material specifically to check whether routine food-safety screening would catch it. When it didn't, they scaled up. That detail uncovers the real dynamic at work: this wasn't a one-off contamination but a deliberate attempt to defeat the tests, betting that a substance absent from every standard panel would go unnoticed — which, until Xiao Zhou's complaint, it did.
The penalty matched the ambition. The company's food production license was revoked, fines and forfeitures totaled more than 380 million yuan, and those responsible face criminal prosecution. For Chinese consumers, who have spent years watching a succession of food-fraud scandals surface on the official broadcaster's periodic food-safety exposés, the case is a bleak confirmation of an old lesson: when a supposed health product promises to replace a prescription drug, it is usually not a supplement. Sometimes it is the drug — or worse, its garbage."