Welbee's supermarket in Santa Venera has been forced to discard thousands of euro worth of freezer and refrigerated items after days of repeated power cuts. 

Freezer units in the popular supermarket were seen empty in a video sent to Times of Malta on Friday, with the company's boss later confirming fridges had also been cleared.

When contacted on Friday afternoon, Welbee's CEO Jonathan Shaw said the items had been cleared for health and safety reasons after temperatures in cooling units began to rise. 

"The moment the temperature goes above a certain threshold we discard the items immediately," he said, stressing the brand had a "strict policy" for chilled and frozen items.  

The cost will run into thousands of euro, he said. 

A storage room full of food that will have to be discarded due to power cuts.

Trolley-loads of goods that will have to be discarded.

Calling the outage a "nightmare", he said the store's generator had struggled to keep up after running continuously from Wednesday afternoon, adding mains electricity had only been restored on Friday morning. 

"Normally a power cut lasts for two or three hours... it's extraordinary to face issues for three days. Enemalta did their best to help but the issue was the length of time," he said. 

"One of my biggest concerns is the waste... it's sad to see food being thrown away," said Shaw, adding only one of the company's stores had been affected.

Frozen and refrigerated items will be replenished once the company was confident that power supplies would remain stable, he said.  

'Substantial losses'

Meanwhile, an industrial electronics company in the Corradino Industrial Estate in Paola was forced to send its 130 workers home on Thursday morning after a suspected power surge caused a fuse to blow.

"It's a 15-minute job to fix, but I had to wait for Enemalta to fix it," said Delta Malta Ltd general manager Aaron Azzopardi.

It took him around two and a half hours to inform Enemalta of the fault after multiple attempts to contact the company by telephone failed, he said.  

"We tried customer support but nobody answered... we had to rely on industrial contacts just to open a support ticket," Azzopardi said.

Describing the costs to the business as "substantial", Azzopardi noted that the outage had also affected a company abroad that relies on Delta's systems. 

Workers had been able to return to work on Friday morning, he said. 

As of Friday afternoon, parts of Birkirkara, Santa Venera, Senglea, Kalkara, Vittoriosa, Cospicua, and Żabbar remained without power, according to the Enemalta website.