The recalled Mamey Pulp was distributed in the 11 states of AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, NM, NV, OR, TX, UT, and WA through retail stores.More than a month before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, Johnson Sea Products Inc. on the Gulf Coast in Coden, AL was having a bad day or two processing its stuffed seafood products.
When an investigator from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration spent time at Johnson over a ten day period in late March, examining a lot of 30 and 35 pound bags of product he found:
-dead insects in 14 bags-live insects in 2 bags.-rodent excreta pellets in 1 bag.-rodent gnaw marks on 2 bags.
The FDA investigator also found 36 rodent excreta pellets along the south wall of the raw ingredient room and a live fly in the processing room located inside a plastic tote containing clean crab shells.
The raw ingredient room also had a hole in the wall.
Johnson Sea Products Inc. received an Aug. 5 FDA warning letter about the problems at the seafood processing facility. The company was given 15 working days to respond to the concerns of FDA’s New Orleans district.
“Accordingly, your stuffed seafood products are adulterated because they have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby they may have been rendered injurious to health,” the warning letter says.
Johnson Sea Products is located just off the Gulf west of Mobile Bay.
Samples collect in March were sent to FDA’s Southeast Regional Laboratory for analysis. SRL confirmed the presence of rodents and their excreta on and in multiple bags of the product.
Fresh Express is recalled 2,825 cases of Veggie Lovers Salad yesterday after a random sample of the product was found to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes in a test conducted by the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
In a press release, the company stated that anyone who has purchased the Fresh Express Veggie Lovers Salad with a Product Code of I208 and Use-by Date of August 10, 2010 should discard the product due to the risk of foodborne illness.
Cases of the recalled Veggie Lovers Salad were distributed by Fresh Express to 13 states with the potential for redistribution by customers to an additional 14 states. States that received the salads include: MO, MI, OH, IL, WI, IN, MD, MA, NY, KS, KY, PA, NJ. States that the salads may have been redistributed to are: AR, TN, WV, IA, MN, DC, VA, VT, NH, NE, RI, PA, CT, MS.
Approximately 2,500 cases of listeriosis are estimated to occur in the U.S. each year. About 200 in every 1000 cases result in death. Certain groups of individuals are at greater risk for listeriosis, including pregnant women (and their unborn children) and people with weakened immune systems, such as cancer and AIDS patients.
No illnesses have been reported in association with the recall.
Questions regarding the recalled products should be directed to the Fresh Express Consumer Response Center at (800) 242-5472, Monday – Friday, 5 a.m. – 8 p.m., Pacific Time. The Product Code and Use-by Date for the recalled salads can be found in the upper right-hand corner of the package.
The next round of the National Restaurant Association Executive Study Group meetings are underway.
These biannual meetings focus on various professional disciplines within the restaurant industry to explore challenges and develop innovative responses to the unique issues specific to those areas.
The Executive Study Groups feature roundtables, expert speakers and peer discussion sessions. Several groups also have listservs for continued communication and shared experiences between conferences. Our members and members of state restaurant associations receive a substantial discount on registration.
Here’s a look at those coming up in the next few months:
* Quality Assurance, Sept. 28-30, Paris Hotel, Las Vegas. The agenda is expected to include a workshop on building restaurant food safety culture and a keynote presentation from Walmart’s vice president of food safety. Discussion topics include Food Code changes, acrylamide, food allergens, sodium reduction, hand hygiene and regulatory challenges.
* Information Technology, Sept. 28-Oct. 1, Millenium Hotel, Minneapolis, Minn. Education sessions will focus on social media, electronic ordering, loyalty marketing and cloud computing.
* Internal Auditors, Sept. 29-Oct. 1, Hotel Valencia, San Antonio, Texas. This executive-level meeting explores the restaurant industry’s diverse financial challenges, such as payment-card industry standards, purchasing audits and tax issues. Attendees earn continuing education credit for educational sessions on auditing issues, profitability, Securities and Exchange Commission requirements, and more.
* Marketing Executives Group, Hotel Valley Ho, Oct. 13-15, Scottsdale, Ariz. The group is expected to release its agenda in the next few weeks. Previous topics have included social media, loyalty marketing, small budgets/big ideas and sales-building ideas.
A maker of kosher salads in New York State is finding itself in trouble with two federal regulatory agencies.
U.F.S. Industries Inc., doing business as Sally Sherman Foods, received a July 21 warning letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and then learned it faces a $247,000 fine from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) largely for failure to correct hazards inside its Mount Vernon facility.
FDA said Sally Sherman’s refrigerated ready-to-eat fishery products packed in oxygen-limiting containers including tuna salad, seafood salad, and cream cheese and lox “are adulterated in that they have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby they may have been rendered injurious to health.”
Since November 2009, OSHA has been trying to get Sally Sherman Foods to provide adequate fall protection, machine guarding, and hazardous energy control for its workers. The agency has proposed the fine because the corrections have not been made.
“The bulk of these sizable fines stem from five instances in which the company agreed to correct specific hazards and did not follow through on that commitment,” said Diana Cortez, OSHA’s area director in Tarrytown. “This situation meant workers at the plant remained exposed to potential falls, lacerations, crushing, and amputation injuries or being caught in the moving parts of machinery. That is not acceptable.”
FDA’s warning letter says Sally Sherman Foods must conduct a hazard analysis to determine the food safety hazards that are likely to occur, and then write a HACCP plan to control them. Currently, its HACCP plan for tuna salad, seafood salad, and cream cheese and lox spread that are packaged in the oxygen-limiting containers and does not take into account the potential for growth of botulism, toxic formations, and allergens.
FDA said the tuna salad is also susceptible to scombrotoxin (histamine) formation.
Its current HACCP plan also falls short because it does not address controlling the food safety hazard of pathogen growth and toxin formation in cooking scallops. For the cream cheese and lox, there is no listed control point for post-cook, pre-mix cooling of the lox to control pathogen growth and toxin formation.
Its OSHA violations are for exposing workers to falls from heights of five to six feet from missing guardrails, and lack of protection from moving parts of mixing machines and shredders. The agency said the plant also lacks a lockout system for machinery. Those items carried the bulk of the fines, some $236,500.
Both federal agencies gave the New York salad maker 15 days to respond to the various violations.
Sally Sherman Foods is “a pioneer in the kosher processing and marketing industry,” according to the Orthodox Union website. The Mount Vernon food processor has been in business for more than 30 years.
The publisher wanted one of us to attend last week’s meetings of the International Association for Food Protection at the Anaheim Convention Center near Disneyland. I decided to go myself and “take one for the team,” hoping this was a group that has a couple of meetings in the morning and then adjourns for pool time.
Given my hopes, I did not choose wisely. IAFP is about as serious about its symposia, roundtables, technical sessions, and poster presentations as any organization I’ve ever encountered.
They had multiple sessions going all day with start times beginning at 8:30 a.m. and not ending until those that began at 4:30 p.m. were over. Numerous newsmakers in multiple rooms present a real dilemma for a reporter. As I told the publisher later, it was a little bit like trying to drink out of a fire hose.
From the sessions I did attend, there was one star of the IAFP that’s worth talking about. News is not, as an old journalism professor once told me, when a dog bites a man. News is when a man bites a dog.
In that spirit, Tim Jackson, the safety guru for Nestle USA, was a star of the IAFP for making news by doing something we do not usually see.
We do not usually see a company whose product was responsible for an outbreak pretty much baring all about the experience in front of an audience of regulators from all levels of government.
Jackson was just six months into his USA assignment from Nestle S.A. in Switzerland when he found himself on a conference call late on June 17, 2009 with officials from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington D.C.
They told him they believed raw cookie dough manufactured by Nestle in Danville, VA was responsible for a multi-state outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 that as of the moment had led to infections in 63 people. Some were critically ill, and would touch death’s door.
Before there was any “recovery” of one of its raw cookie dough products with a test positive for E. coli, or anything else like a date or product type that would help narrow the scope, Jackson said Nestle had a decision to make.
“Everything we had on the market was potentially at risk,” Jackson said. He brought together the company’s crisis management team and opted to recall its entire cookie dough line-up. It was the largest recall in scope in the history of Nestle USA, a company that still managed $10.4 billion in sales last year.
Twenty-four hours later, FDA inspectors arrived at the Danville plant to launch the investigation that would go on for months. Jackson says, the plant continued cookie dough production just so FDA could watch how it made.
All that dough was discarded along with the recalled product. When FDA had seen enough, the plant was shut down and taken apart as Nestle tried to solve the mystery of how a bacterium that typically originates in the hind gut of a cow ended up in raw cookie dough.
The investigators looked at just about everything. Raw materials, air and water, the plant and equipment, the possibility of some outside event like a failure of the municipal water system, cross contamination, and employees were among the items investigated.
Most of these were dead-ends. Nestle and FDA both investigated possible “disgruntled employees” and concluded there was not any evidence of that. Some employees do live in rural areas with access to cattle, but environmental controls for coming and going were sufficient.
Nestle did not subject employees to testing because that would probably be too evasive from a legal standpoint, and there was no indication any employee was a problem.
Because different strains of E. coli were found in cookie dough at the plant and then after in January 2010 after it went back into production (none of these were ever shipped), Nestle opted to switch to using only “heat treated” flour.
In a panel specifically on flour, Jackson shared Nestlé’s proprietary research on testing flour for E. coli O157:H7. It has long been known that flour can harbor bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli.
But since almost all flour is cooked in some form before it’s consumed that has not been a problem. The common practice of eating raw cookie dough and the now growing trend of eating raw frozen pizza has both the industry and its regulators concerned.
Jackson disclosed that Nestle had to sample more than 32,000 samples of flour before coming up with one positive test for E. coli. Still, as the investigation continued and the repeat presence of E. coli was found in cookie dough in January, Nestle USA opted to go with “heat-treated” flour.
While flour is tops on the suspect list, Jackson says Nestle cannot say it found the “root cause.”
Nestle figures the recall and investigation has cost the company more than $30 million, with ongoing research and litigation still ahead. For Nestle, Jackson said, it was good news that its cookie dough sales quickly resumed their place in the market once the product was returned to the shelf in new packaging and colors.
As it took apart is plant, equipment, ingredients, transportation system, and other elements, Nestle searched for the “root cause” using a system that diagrams like boning a fish.
When Jackson was through with his second presentation of the conference, I don’t think anyone could think of a bone he’d missed.
