Blaming consumers for food safety recalls

According to The Packer, which writes about produce, “recent statements in national media about so-called consumer recall fatigue spurred discussion in the fresh produce and food safety communities, with leaders suggesting consumer complacency is the more prevalent problem.”

So are dangerous microorganisms that consumers have little hope of removing on fresh produce the fault of consumers, not farmers?

Richard Raymond, USDA undersecretary for food safety from 2005-09 told The Packer, “Complacency is a more accurate description of what’s going on with consumers.”

Produce food safety starts on the farm.

Recall fatigue redux: does social media help or hinder?

In July 2007, Robert Brackett, then director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition said during the Castleberry canned chili sauce botulism outbreak consumers may be suffering "recall fatigue," given the rash of recalls the past year for spinach, carrot juice, lettuce, peanut butter, pet food and other products. "That’s a real phenomenon. If people aren’t getting sick or their family isn’t, they think ‘Oh, it’s not going to happen to me.’"

I said that public communications about such undertakings must be rapid, reliable, repeated and relevant, and that the produce outbreaks of 2006 marked significant changes in how stories were being told on Internet-based networking like YouTube, wikipedia, and blogs. Producers, processors, retailers and regulators of agricultural commodities not only need to be seen — and actually — responding to food safety issues in conventional media, they must now pay particular attention to the myriad of Internet-based social networking sites that allow individuals to act as their own media outlet. Further, proactive producers, regulators and others in the farm-to-fork food safety system will become comfortable with the directness — and especially the speed — of new Internet-based media.

In 2010, the Washington Post reported that government regulators, retailers, manufacturers and consumer experts were concerned that recall notices have become so frequent across a range of goods — foods, consumer products, cars — that the public is suffering from "recall fatigue."

Craig Wilson, assistant vice president for quality assurance and food safety at Costco, was quoted as saying in 2010 that, "The national recall system that’s in place now just doesn’t work. We call it the Chicken Little syndrome. If you keep shouting at the wind — ‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling!’ — people literally become immune to the message."

Today, USA Today has a story about recall fatigue.

Consumers last year were deluged with 2,363 recalls, or about 6.5 recalls each day, covering consumer products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and food, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The recalls announced mark a nearly 14 percent increase from 2,081 in 2010 and compare with about 1,460 in 2007.

Christopher Doering writes that the increase is the result of a combination of greater oversight by regulators, better testing procedures and the use of social media where consumers can quickly point out and discuss problems with other people.

Increasingly, retailers and government agencies are expanding the methods they use to communicate with the public — from social-media technologies such as Twitter and Facebook to more traditional methods such as phone calls and postings within their stores. But the same methods that prove successful in reaching one customer could just as easily be ignored by another.

"We don’t feel that our members are getting bombarded but certainly the general public is and sooner or later you don’t know what to believe," said Craig Wilson, vice president for quality assurance and food safety at the warehouse giant Costco.

The 602-store warehouse chain uses data supplied from its estimated 60 million members and notifies them within 24 hours if they’ve purchased a recalled item. It then follows up with a letter. The result is that customers return about 90% of recently recalled products and, in the case of major recalls such as when a food product could cause serious health problems or death, Costco gets "the majority of everything that was sold back."

But Wilson says the national recall system "doesn’t work as designed" and that consumers and retailers alike would benefit from a single, uniform network. He says the CPSC, USDA and FDA each have a different recall system with unique requirements, making it more difficult for companies like his to make sure they are complying with the rules.

At Rochester, New York-based Wegmans, the grocery chain has a detailed recall plan that can require hundreds of people to carry out. The 81-store East Coast chain follows a recall protocol increasingly common among retailers: posting recall information on its web page and within stores for customers, notifying its followers using social media tools and, when possible, calling individuals who may have used a store card for the purchase.

Businesses can ease the burden of a recall on their reputation and bottom line by being honest and upfront with their customers and crafting a response plan before any recall occurs that outlines what they will do with the public, media and regulators, industry watchers say.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack downplayed the number of recalls that are announced considering the number of products that are produced, items that are sold and meals consumed each day.

"I think people want to know and need to know and have a right to know if there is a problem with a particular product," said Vilsack. "We’re going to look at ways in which we (communicate) and constantly improve how we communicate but we’re not going to stop communicating."

It’s the medium and the message: rapid reliable relevant repeated messages to combat recall fatigue

Until three years ago, Kenneth Maxwell enjoyed Banquet chicken and turkey pot pies so much he ate them three or four times a week. They were easy to prepare, and Maxwell could eat one for lunch and quickly return to work as an electrician.

When cases of salmonella poisoning led the pies’ manufacturer, ConAgra Foods, to issue a product recall in the fall of 2007, Maxwell did not hear about it and continued to eat them. He bought several pot pies about two weeks after the recall was launched, when they should have been pulled from store shelves, and became violently ill, he said.

Steve Mills of the Chicago Tribune reports this morning that Maxwell’s experience reflects common problems with food recalls: They routinely fail to recover all of the product they seek and, according to experts, sometimes even leave tainted foods in stores, putting consumers at risk of becoming ill from potentially deadly foodborne pathogens.

If consumers are suffering from recall fatigue, what about retailers who are supposed to get potentially contaminated product off the shelves?

Communications about recalls with both the public and retailers, must be rapid, reliable, repeated and relevant, and that the produce outbreaks of 2006 marked significant changes in how recall stories were being told on Internet-based networking like YouTube, wikipedia, and blogs.

The Tribune story says a spokesman for Jewel-Osco’s corporate parent said relying on the media, posting shelf notices and making sure store employees are prepared to answer customers’ questions all have worked with recalls in the past.

Safeway, the parent of Dominick’s food stores, contacts shoppers directly in some recalls — typically smaller ones, said spokesman Brian Dowling. But in larger recalls, he said the company’s stores rely on other methods to get the word out, such as notices on store shelves and stories in newspapers and on TV and radio.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently released the Government’s Products Recall app for the Android smartphone at USA.gov website.

And it will be the same boring message. Marshall McLuhan famously said “The medium is the message” (that’s him above, right, in a scene from the movie, Annie Hall). With food safety recalls, it’s the medium and the message, if you want to get people’s attention.

The Maxwells said they have not eaten a Banquet pot pie since the recall.
 

Recall fatigue? Rapid, reliable, relevant and repeated messages work; shock and shame to avoid boredom

Julie Schmit and Elizabeth Weise reported in USA Today on July 27, 2007 that retailers have been slow to pull Castleberry’s canned chili products that may contain botulism.

Robert Brackett, then director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (best wishes on the new Illinois job, Bob — dp) said consumers may be suffering "recall fatigue," given the rash of recalls the past year for spinach, carrot juice, lettuce, peanut butter, pet food and other products. "That’s a real phenomenon. If people aren’t getting sick or their family isn’t, they think ‘Oh, it’s not going to happen to me.’"

I told the reporters at the time that public communications about such undertaking must be rapid, reliable, repeated and relevant, and that the produce outbreaks of 2006 marked significant changes in how stories were being told on Internet-based networking like YouTube, wikipedia, and blogs. Producers, processors, retailers and regulators of agricultural commodities not only need to be seen — and actually — responding to food safety issues in conventional media, they must now pay particular attention to the myriad of Internet-based social networking sites that allow individuals to act as their own media outlet. Further, proactive producers, regulators and others in the farm-to-fork food safety system will become comfortable with the directness — and especially the speed — of new Internet-based media.

Three years later, the Washington Post reported this morning that government regulators, retailers, manufacturers and consumer experts are concerned that recall notices have become so frequent across a range of goods — foods, consumer products, cars — that the public is suffering from "recall fatigue."

Witty.

In many cases, people simply ignore urgent calls to destroy or return defective goods.
One recent study found that 12 percent of Americans who knew they had recalled food at home ate it anyway.

Jeff Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the Food and Drug Administration, who said even his wife has complained about the difficulty of keeping pace with recalls, added,

"It’s a real issue. That number is steadily going up, and it’s difficult for us to get the word out without oversaturating consumers."

Craig Wilson, assistant vice president for quality assurance and food safety at Costco, was quoted as saying,

"The national recall system that’s in place now just doesn’t work. We call it the Chicken Little syndrome. If you keep shouting at the wind — ‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling!’ — people literally become immune to the message."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture today said the Government’s Products Recall app for the Android smartphone is now available at the revamped USA.gov website, and the apps for Blackberry and iPhone are soon to follow.

And it will be the same boring message. It’s the medium and the message, if you want to get people’s attention.