Tag Archives: Third-party Audits

Killer cantaloupe and the fraud of third party audits: Feel safe, now that lawsuits from Listeria outbreak that killed 33 are settled?

Posted on by
Reply

The legal fallout from one of the most deadly outbreaks of foodborne illness in decades has settled, according to an attorney involved in the litigation.

jensen.cantaloupe.2The Washington Post reports lawsuits involving more than 20 defendants in the outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that killed 33 people and sickened 147 in 2011 wrapped up last week with a settlement among some of the main participants, said William Marler, a Seattle attorney whose firm represented 50 of the victims.

Terms of the latest settlement — which included the Kroger grocery chain, a large broker and an auditor — are confidential, he said. Wal-Mart, which sold melons to some of the people who fell ill, had previously settled.

The Food and Drug Administration traced the outbreak to unsanitary conditions at a Colorado farm packing facility where the cantaloupes were washed, boxed and shipped out. The owners of Jensen Farms went bankrupt and pleaded guilty to six  misdemeanors in the case.

Attorney Jeff Whittington, representing third-party auditor Primus, confirmed to the Packer the litigation against the company was dismissed.

Will Steele, president of Frontera, Edinberg, Texas, said the company is “focused on strengthening the industry’s traceability efforts.”

“The matter is in the process of being resolved,” Steele said. “Settlement documents have been exchanged with the plaintiffs, and the parties anticipate that those documents will be signed by all the required parties. However, the settlement isn’t officially concluded until that occurs. We believe a final settlement of all claims will be reached soon.”

At least 147 people became sick and at least 33 died because of listeria infections after eating cantaloupe from Jensens Farms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC estimates at least 10 other people who had the outbreak strains of listeria had eaten the Jensen cantaloupe, but health officials had not confirmed the link when filing out death certificates.

The victims, their families, Frontera Produce, the Kroger Co. and its subsidiaries, and cantaloupe growers Eric and Ryan Jensen all contended in various court cases that Primus Group Inc., doing business as PrimusLabs, should have been held partly responsible.

cantaloupe.salmonellaThey contended the Jensens would not have been able to sell their cantaloupe if their operation had not received high marks for food safety during an audit just before harvest began in 2011.

The settlement with Kroger and Frontera will also result in dismissal of cases those two companies and the Jensen brothers had filed against Primus and Bio Food Safety, which is the third-party auditing company hired by Primus to conduct the 2011 audit of the Jensens’ operation.

Bio Food Safety auditor James DiIorio gave the operation a “superior” rating of 96%. Primus contended in various court documents that it was not hired to do any microbial testing and that the Jensens’ cantaloupe would have been sold and eaten regardless of the audit score.

Grocers claim audits reduce foodborne illness; no evidence provided

Posted on by
1

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Grocery Manufacturers Association came out with a whopper that no one seems to have noticed.

In a press release intended to highlight private sector initiatives to bolster food safety – which I’m all for, they make the profit, they should shoulder the burden when they make their customers barf – GMA said,

“Ultimately, wider use of third party certification/audits will reduce the risk of food-borne illnesses.”

There is absolutely no evidence to support that statement.

In case there is some confusion, here is the statement in full:

Third party audits are an important part of America’s food safety net.  To ensure rigor and integrity in third party certification, policymakers and industry leaders should encourage the engagement of auditors employed by certification bodies accredited to international standards by recognized organizations such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). … By increasing the number of well-qualified auditors and developing universal food safety auditing criteria, industry leaders and policymakers will ensure that auditors are competent to review a particular facility, discourage duplicative audits, reduce auditing costs, and encourage wider use of third party certification/audits throughout the food industry. Ultimately, wider use of third party certification/audits will reduce the risk of food-borne illnesses.

I’ve been hearing such statements for 15 years, and while it sounds good, I’ve seen little evidence to back such proclamations. As I’ve written before,

The third-party food safety audit scheme that processors and retailers insisted upon is no better than a financial Ponzi scheme. The vast number of facilities and suppliers means audits are required, but people have been replaced by paper. Audits, inspections, training and systems are no substitute for developing a strong food safety culture, farm-to-fork, and marketing food safety directly to consumers.

If someone barfs, they’re going to go after the biggest name they can find, whether it’s a retailer or a processor. So protect that brand. Have your own people and some institutional expertise to assess food safety risks. And avoid unsubstantiated statements.
 

Audits do not enhance food safety culture

Posted on by
Reply

“After the PCA (Peanut Corporation of America) plant, you had all the employees saying [the PCA facility] was a dump. It would have been nice for them to say that before nine people died.”

That’s what I told a student reporter for the Kansas State Collegian in this morning’s issue.

The reporter, Tyler Sharp, has been working on a story about Manhattan’s own American Institute of Baking, the auditor at the center of the PCA Salmonella fiasco, for weeks, and had trouble finding anyone to talk. After a March 6, 2009 article in the N.Y. Times sorta shattered the myth of third-party food safety audits, Tyler figured the homegrown story would be a no-brainer. Except he couldn’t get anyone to talk.

Since the release of the Times article, AIB now requires a minimum of two days or longer to complete an inspection at a food processing facility. AIB has also announced it will change the name of its Good Manufacturing Practices inspection certificates from “Certificate of Achievement” to “Recognition of Achievement.”

Is that like Homer Simpson winning the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence?

I told Tyler, the reporter,

“Third-party food audits, like restaurant inspection, are a snapshot in time. They are not indicative of what happens day in and day out. It doesn’t really tell you much. There are some audits that are OK. It depends on the auditor. My concern is that — and I have done a lot of work with farmers and producers and companies — what you really want is to help people become better with food safety, whereas an audit is just a checklist that penalizes people. That doesn’t necessarily help people get better with food safety.”

The third-party food safety audit scheme that processors and retailers insisted upon is no better than a financial Ponzi scheme. The vast number of facilities and suppliers means audits are required, but people have been replaced by paper. Audits, inspections, training and systems are no substitute for developing a strong food safety culture, farm-to-fork, and marketing food safety directly to consumers rather than the local/natural/organic hucksterism is a way to further reinforce the food safety culture.

Costco, a retail store, which previously limited AIB’s inspections to its bakery vendors, has now instructed suppliers to not use AIB at all.

“The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”

Or as Mansour Samadpour of Seattle says,

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education.”

Third party food safety audits are like mail-order diplomas

Posted on by
5

Mansour, I couldn’t have said it better myself:

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety.

The Ponzi scheme that is third-party food safety audits is starting to collapse. Watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last night, the questions he asked to a N.Y. Times reporter about the financial mess could have easily been mapped to the food safety mess (see video below).

The N.Y. Times will report in tomorrow’s editions that the American Institute of Baking auditor who gave the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Georgia a superior rating before the peanut-salmonella shitstorm, was an expert in fresh produce and was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning — which he was not required to test for anyway. Oh, and PCA paid for the audit which Kelloog’s then blindly accepted.

The auditor even wrote in a Jan. 20 e-mail after the salmonella outbreak became public, that, “I never thought that this bacteria would survive in the peanut butter type environment. What the heck is going on??”

That’s why there’s FSnet and barfblog and hundreds of other food safety resources out there; he never heard of Peter Pan and salmonella in 2007?

In 2007, Keystone Foods, the Pennsylvania plant that makes Veggie Booty, received an “excellent” rating from the American Institute of Baking. But the audit did not extend to ingredient suppliers, including a New Jersey company whose imported spices from China were tainted with salmonella.

“The only thing that matters is productivity,” said Robert A. LaBudde, a food safety expert who has consulted with food companies for 30 years, adding that “you only get in trouble if someone in the media traces it back to you, and that’s rare, like a meteor strike.”

Dr. LaBudde said a sausage plant hired him five years ago to determine the species of bacillus plaguing its meat. But the owner then refused to complete the testing. “I called them ‘anthrax sausages,’ and said they could be killing older people in the state, and still they wouldn’t do it,” he said, declining to name the company. …

Before the salmonella outbreak, Costco had rebuffed repeated proposals by the organization to inspect all its food suppliers. “The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top food safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”

Costco, Kraft Foods and Darden Restaurants are among a group of food manufacturers and other companies that use detailed plans to prevent food safety hazards. They also supplement third-party audits with their own inspections and testing of ingredients and plant surfaces for microbes.

 

 
 

PB and Salmonella: where are the third-party audits?

Posted on by
1

Watching the number of recalls continue to grow in the Salmonella in peanut butter debacle, I’m wondering why is it taking some of these companies so long to issue a recall? Today it was Jenny Craig and dozens others. My guess is these distributors have no idea what’s in the products they are hawking and it takes weeks to track down such info. If a food processor really knows its suppliers, it should take hours or minutes to figure out if the suspect ingredient is in some kid’s peanut cracker snacks or Kirstie Alley’s Jenny Craig bar (she’s not with the program anymore? Oh).

And sure, everyone’s calling for better government oversight, but what about the third-party auditors? If Peanut Corporation of America was supplying paste and industrial tubs of peanut butter to all these processors and distributers, they must have had third-party auditors through the peanut processing plant in Blakely, Georgia. What problems did the auditors uncover? And what was done about such problems?