While CFIA’s bulk hazelnut/Salmonella health alerts continue to roll in, Lynne Terry, the Oregonian’s keen food safety (and other stuff) journo cracked the hazelnut case by doing a bit of calling around last week. Terry reports that the recalled product was produced by a co-op, Hazelnut Growers of Oregon in Cornelius, OR and was distributed by Délices de la Forêt Valli (which now appears on the CFIA website, but there’s not any info on the producer’s or distributor’s sites).
The nuts, which were shipped in-shell, were potentially contaminated with salmonella, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Linda LeBlanc, an agency spokeswoman, said they came from Hazelnut Growers of Oregon, a farmer-owned cooperative with a plant in Cornelius.
LeBlanc said the salmonella contamination was discovered by the coop, which in turn informed its customer, Délices de la Forét in Quebec. The nuts were distributed to a number of bakeries and markets in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec and were sold in packages or in bulk. In French-speaking Canada, they were labeled avelines en écales, hazelnuts in-shell.
According to Terry, Oregon produces most of the domestic supply of hazelnuts in the US.