News about the recall of Peanut Corporation of America products and recriminations for the companies caught with suspect products continues to make headlines this weekend. While much of the reporting is retracing well-covered ground, heath.newsbios did spot some fresh, engaging articles.
- Some recalled peanut butter snacks still in stores -- By Craig Schneider and Doug Nurse (2/8), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“It’s so confusing,” said Shelly Awl, a clerk at a gas station on Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta. “I wish they would communicate better what is safe and what is not.”
Awl said she spent Thursday morning sorting through the snacks trying to determine what was safe. She had removed some Frito-Lay and Lance snacks that are not on the recall list.
Still there on the shelf, however, were two boxes of recalled Austin brand Toasty Crackers with Peanut Butter.
She threw them out when informed by a reporter that they were on the recall list.
Awl said she spent Thursday morning sorting through the snacks trying to determine what was safe. She had removed some Frito-Lay and Lance snacks that are not on the recall list.
Still there on the shelf, however, were two boxes of recalled Austin brand Toasty Crackers with Peanut Butter.
She threw them out when informed by a reporter that they were on the recall list.
- Peanut recall clears food banks' shelves -- By Francesca Jarosz (2/8), Indianapolis Star
Now Gleaners [Food Bank of Indiana] and other charities that provide food for the needy are scrambling to find a replacement for a staple source of protein just as demand for food is skyrocketing.
Throwing food away "makes us sick," said Pamela Altmeyer, president and chief executive officer of Gleaners. "But better that we would be sick at heart than someone be sick in their body."
Also of Note:
- Opinion: Food Safety Mustn't Be Left In FDA's Hands -- By U.S. Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, D-New Haven (2/8), The Hartford Courant
To truly fix inherent problems in our food safety system, we must fundamentally restructure the food safety bureaucracy at the FDA. Today, food safety is divided among multiple, separately managed units at the FDA — the Office of the Commissioner, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, the Center for Veterinary Medicine, the field force (Office of Regulatory Affairs) and the National Center for Toxicological Research. As a result, there is no one single individual to be held accountable for food safety at the FDA or anywhere else at the federal level.
Separating food safety regulation from drug and device approvals would go a long way toward restoring the balance that has long been missing at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and give food safety the attention it deserves. By establishing a Food Safety Administration within Health and Human Services, headed by its own commissioner, we can give food safety experts and researchers the room and the resources to do their jobs.
- Editorial: Questioning Food Safety -- The Plain Dealer (2/7)
FDA inspectors noted in September that they refused to let adulterated nuts from the Georgia plant back in the United States after a Canadian importer rejected them. Yet it appears that FDA inspectors did not visit the suspect plant.
Such incompetence is incomprehensible, a sign that the nation's food inspection system is flat out broken.
- Editorial: The FDA - Making Us Sick -- The Philadelphia Inquirer (2/7)
It says much about the depth of our food-safety crisis that, before the feds could get around to any other sanctions against Peanut Corp., they had to stop doing business with it.
History Repeats As Crisis Communicators Mismanage the 2009 Peanut Butter Recall
Rotbart, an award-wining investigative reporter and executive editor of NewsBios.com, will conduct a 90-minute webinar on February 27th titled, Media Relations Lessons from the 2009 Peanut Butter Recall. For complete details send an email to: info@editor-in-chief.com.
By Dean Rotbart
The most recent salmonella outbreak, spread through tainted peanut butter products, has spawned the largest food product recall in American history.
It has also demonstrated convincingly that for all Corporate America should have learned from dozens of earlier product recalls dating back decades, food and consumer products companies remain glaringly ignorant of what communications steps count most in the early hours and days of a health and safety recall.
Never have so many smart companies with so much at stake entrusted so much, so mistakenly, to the power of the news release and on-the-job reporters.
Of course your products are affected! Perhaps not legally, but in the minds of consumers and the marketplace, you are front and center in this national catastrophe. Don’t believe me? Just ask your sales force what it is hearing back from the field?
It seems so obvious that I’m almost ashamed to write this, but when it comes to product recalls, the media’s interests and your company’s or brand’s needs are not aligned.
For nearly three decades, I’ve witnessed up close the ways in which journalists perceive a product recall and the ways in which companies respond to these unfortunate events. I first reported on the topic in 1980 as the lead reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering Procter & Gamble’s recall of its Rely tampons, which were implicated in a disproportionate number of cases of toxic shock syndrome.
In the ensuing years I’ve covered other recalls and covered the journalists and news organizations covering the recalls, from Tylenol to jalepeños, baby formula to peanut butter.
Each incident has its own peculiarities and generalizations about recalls are just that. But there are patterns that reoccur each and every time the public’s safety is endangered by a faulty device or tainted food. And these patterns can be crucial to anticipate when a fresh outbreak arises.
Editors or reporters sitting in a newsroom who get a news release from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) alerting them to illness and/or death related to a consumer product, have many questions they want answered.
How many people are affected? How many products are impacted? How large a geographical region is involved? Which manufacturers are implicated? How quickly can the products be removed from shelves? What actions are the FDA and CDC taking? What medical symptoms arise? How are those symptoms treated? Is there negligence involved? And so on.
Preserving the reputations of those good companies that have recalled products or protecting the reputations of those good companies who have similar products that are not being recalled, is not high on the agenda of journalists – if it is on their agenda at all.
That is your job. And, to be frank, it is hard to find even one major national company that makes or sells peanut-butter containing products that clearly acted on this necessity from the get-go in early January 2009.
The marketplace, the ultimate arbiter of whether crisis communications works, is overwhelmingly reminding food and snack companies that when recalls arise, the tidal wave of bad publicity is indiscriminate. In this instance, it has engulfed tainted peanut butter brands, non-tainted brands, even non-peanut butter products.
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