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.