During my 40-plus-year career in frozen and fresh packaged fruits and vegetables, I have had more firsthand experience with food recalls than I ever wanted.
I have been directly responsible for managing five produce recalls involving national brands, including the 2006 spinach recall. I have also managed five other potential recalls that ultimately proved to be false alarms or regulatory laboratory errors, and consulted on several additional produce recalls.
I know what it is like when your product is linked to serious illness. And I know what it is like when it is linked to fatalities.
That experience has changed the way I look at food safety.
I have never written publicly about these experiences before, and my comments are not directed at any current recall or company. They are based on situations where I had direct knowledge or involvement.
But there is something I increasingly hear following produce recalls that I believe our industry needs to stop saying:
“Consumers need to understand that fresh produce can never be completely risk-free.”
Every time I hear that, my blood boils.
Of course, produce carries risk. It is grown outdoors, exposed to weather, animals, soil, water and countless environmental variables. Everyone who has spent time in agriculture understands that. Our industry provides literally billions of servings of fresh, nutritious, and safe food every day.
But when someone gets seriously sick, the words “inherent risk” cannot be any part of any answer.
Try explaining “inherent risk” to someone who contracted E. coli, developed hemolytic uremic syndrome and may need a kidney transplant.
Try explaining it to parents who lost their two-year-old child. Suddenly, the argument that “nothing can ever be completely safe” doesn’t sound quite as reassuring.
Consumers Aren’t Asking for Perfect Food Safety
Consumers aren’t demanding that agriculture somehow eliminate every microorganism from the environment.
They are asking something much more reasonable:
“Did you do everything you reasonably could to keep this from happening?”
That is a question every produce company should be prepared to answer.
Our industry advertises food safety. We talk about our certifications, audits, testing programs, sanitation systems, traceability and preventive controls.
We ask consumers to trust us. With that trust comes responsibility.
“There is always some inherent risk” may be scientifically accurate, but it should never become an excuse for failing to find out what went wrong.
What Produce Recalls Can Teach Us About Food Safety
One of the most important lessons I have learned from working through recalls is that major food safety events rarely come completely out of nowhere.
When you conduct a brutally honest post-mortem, you usually find cracks.
Sometimes they are tiny.
A procedure wasn’t followed exactly. A supplier assumption was never challenged. A transportation practice wasn’t examined closely enough. A sanitation issue seemed insignificant.
Individually, none of these things may cause a recall, but sometimes enough cracks line up and the dam breaks.
Every recall I have personally worked on eventually led us somewhere. There was a weakness, failure or unexpected pathway that needed to be understood.
That doesn’t necessarily mean someone was reckless or negligent. It means the system wasn’t as bulletproof as everyone thought it was.
Food Safety Problems Can Begin Somewhere Nobody Thought to Look
I once consulted on a recall involving an allergen. The company was convinced the allergen could not possibly have come through its supply chain.
Their processing facility had excellent food safety programs. Their procedures were strong. Their people were competent.
On paper, the explanation didn’t make sense. Until someone traced the transportation route.
It was eventually discovered that a driver hauling open bins had taken a shortcut through a grove of nut trees.
Think about that for a moment. The problem wasn’t necessarily inside the processing plant. It wasn’t necessarily something an auditor would have discovered while reviewing procedures. It was somewhere nobody initially thought to look.
That experience reinforced one of the most important principles I have learned:
When something goes wrong, stop trying to prove why it couldn’t have happened and start trying to discover how it did.
During a Food Recall, Don’t Make Your First Meeting About Defending Yourself
After a recall begins, there is enormous pressure. People are alleging your product caused their illness.
Executives are worried about the brand. Salespeople are worried about customers. Employees are worried about their jobs. Regulators are asking questions. And attorneys are understandably concerned about liability.
The natural instinct is to start defending the company, but I believe that can be a mistake. There will be plenty of time for lawyers to determine responsibility.
The first questions should be:
Are consumers still at risk?
What happened?
How did it happen?
What are we going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?
If the first meeting after a food safety crisis is primarily about protecting the company’s reputation rather than finding the truth, I would argue the priorities are backwards.
Ironically, the best way to protect the company’s reputation may be to aggressively search for the truth. In my experience consumers can be very forgiving if they see a company taking responsibility and showing empathy. The lawyers will advise against that but there is a way to show empathy without having all the answers just yet.
A Food Safety Crisis Plan Shouldn’t Just Be a Binder
The second major lesson I learned is that companies need people who are actually trained to manage a crisis.
Not someone who attended a two-hour seminar. Not someone who read the crisis-management manual. And not someone who discovers during a national recall that they are suddenly the company spokesperson.
There is a delicate balance between what the consumers need to hear, what the lawyers want you to say, and what the regulators want you to do. This is where trained and experienced company leadership can make or break the situation.
Years ago, one of my employers invested in serious crisis-management training for me. I sat in a television studio while real reporters grilled me for hours with difficult questions. Afterward, communications professionals dissected and critiqued my answers. We discussed what worked, what didn’t, and how my words and body language could be interpreted. It was very intense and humbling at the same time.
Then we did it again, and again. It was uncomfortable, but that was the point. What I initially thought was the correct response was totally off base. A good reporter lives for the sound bite, and those sound bites travel at the speed of social media.
You do not want the first hostile interview of your career to happen while television cameras are outside your facility and your company’s name is leading the evening news.
Produce Food Safety Is Never Finished
Fresh produce presents challenges that many other foods do not. Unless it is blanched, there is no traditional kill step between the field and the consumer.
That makes prevention even more important. Food safety programs cannot simply be written, audited and placed on a shelf. They need to be challenged. Tested. Questioned. And occasionally attacked by your own people as though they were trying to find a way to make them fail.
Because eventually, the real world will test them. If you are in fresh produce processing long enough you are bound to experience a recall first-hand. And the real world doesn’t care how good your last audit score was.
I have seen companies survive serious recalls, some of them being my own. I have also seen companies ultimately fail because of the recall itself or because of how the crisis was handled.
Hundreds—and sometimes thousands—of livelihoods can depend on the decisions made during those first hours and days.
But none of those considerations can come before the person who bought your product believing it was safe to feed their family.
That’s the obligation that comes with producing food. Period.
Protect the consumer first. Find the truth second. Fix what failed third. Defend yourself later, all in that order.
Because once consumers stop trusting you with the food they put on their family’s table, no certification, press release, or marketing campaign may be enough to win that trust back.
Eric Schwartz, CEO – Eckert Frozen Foods