When food firm Wanis lost the rights to import popular Jamaican sauce Pickapeppa, They decided they would make the sauce themselves in a factory 4,690 miles from Jamaica in Wisbech, Cambs UK.They invented their own recipe, printed thousands of fake labels and produced around 30,000 bottles of the counterfeit sauce over 16 months.
The scam wasn't exposed until a shopper noticed the sauce tasted sweeter than usual and complained to Pickapeppa’s Jamaican producers. Wanis managers Sanjay Wadhwani, 45, and Vickas Shah, 35, admitted breaking trademark laws last week at Harrow Crown Court, North-West London. They were given community sentences and the firm, one of the UK’s biggest Afro-Caribbean food specialists, was fined £10,000 with £73,000 costs.