If they don't know what's wrong, how did they know what to fix? This is still fishy to me. Also, shame on the author for using the term "ratted out" when this company was selling a substandard product to Americans.
So while you are technically correct that the product is substandard, you could well argue that the issue is the arbitrary standard rather than the actual product.
They are not just arbitrary, they are often deliberately antagonizing imports.
Pure speculation, but for example if they did design a process to enrich their pasta with iron, tested it initially, but then never tested it again (who cares if there's iron in pasta...), and then it stopped working for some reason (or possibly never worked reliably in the first place). And then instead of trying to find out what made this process not work, they just came up with a new process that did work.
As I said, it's speculation.
Another option is of course "I perfectly know, but I cannot tell you, because if I did, we'd be in legal trouble".