Fisher & Paykel responds to DishDrawer recall: ‘transparency is key’

By Claire Reilly

Fisher & Paykel issued a recall of selected models from its DishDrawer range yesterday, with the ACCC releasing a notice on its website indicating affected models had the potential to cause “mild electric shock” to consumers.

Following the news, F&P’s general manager of marketing, Peter Russell spoke to Current.com.au to emphasise that the company was taking extra precautions to ensure the safety of consumers.

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“We need to keep in mind these DishDrawers were our series 3s,” said Russell. “We are now onto our series or Phase 7s. So they are previous technology that has now been improved upon and surpassed a number of times over. A great number of these are over 10 years old or more, so many households will be close to replacing this aged appliance by now anyway.

“In Australia, around 250,000 of these products were sold between 2000 and 2007. Many households have quite likely updated their DishDrawers with newer models, so the actual number still out there is likely much less than that initial number.

“Of the remaining series in market only a tiny fraction of these will likely even be affected. We need to keep in mind that we are protecting against an extremely unlikely occurrence.

“Consumers are quite used to product recalls; they are an everyday occurrence across virtually every category,” he added. “Most connected electronic devices are receiving patches and updates almost continuously – this is the same.

“We must remind ourselves these are now quite old products, but Fisher & Paykel takes matters like this seriously; we take the integrity of our products seriously so we have designed and produced an easily replaced item to simply swap out the identified piece.

“We trust trade and consumers alike will see Fisher & Paykel are quickly and expediently solving a minor issue with a now long superseded model and have a number of solution options for our end customers. Transparency and honesty are key. We hope people will respect that.”