PCA Facts Coming Out Slowly
An article in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:
Texas health officials said Wednesday that a sample of peanut meal from the Texas plant tested positive for salmonella and also matched the genetic fingerprint of the salmonella implicated in the national outbreak.
Peanut products were regularly shipped between Peanut Corp.’s Blakely, Ga., and Plainview, Texas, processing plants, raising the prospect of a contamination link between the two plants, the FDA said Wednesday.
The Blakely plant’s shipments included honey-roasted peanuts, hot and spicy peanuts and other seasoned products, said Stephanie Kwisnek, a spokeswoman for the FDA. The Plainview plant shipped peanut meal to Blakely, she said.
Sundlof, of the FDA, said the agency suspects that the salmonella contamination originated from the Blakely plant and was transferred to the Plainview plant. Many more contaminated products have been traced to the Georgia facility, he said.
So much for my speculation that they weren't shipping back and forth. But the peanut meal comment is intriguing. I think you'd only ship peanut meal if you intended to use it to make peanut butter. And if you look at the CDC site, you can see that all the tests associated with illness came from peanut butter or peanut paste (which, by the way, is also peanut butter -- it just doesn't have anything added) and are a single strain -- now tied back to the Plainview plant.
I'd make the opposite inference from the one Sudlof made -- I'd assume the transfer of bacteria was from was from Plainview to Blakely, based on this article. Infected meal is sent from Texas to Georgia to be ground into peanut butter, and there you go.
And I'd sure want to find out where that peanut meal came from.
Regulation and the Locavores
All regulations come with unintended consequences. In a comment about the Georgia food testing legislation I left over at Effect Measure, I pointed out:
Keep an eye on the locavores. A substantial sub-set of the let's call it "micro-producer" community views additional regulation as an attempt to stamp them out. I don't want to argue about the merits, but I think the politics will get interesting in some states...
In a response to this comment Ron says:
Jeff raises an important point. Historically, increasing regulations of this type penalize small producers, pushing the system to greater size, cost cutting and centralization, thus increasing the problem rather than solving it. Recall the spinach incident of last year, also of wide impact due to centralized post-harvest processing. Both incidents had such a high impact because a single processing plant supplied such a wide sector with product. "Economies of scale" and mistaken ideas of "efficiency" inspire greater regulatory burdens that are actually counterproductive, making our food system less safe instead of safer. This is not what is needed.
Retailer consolidation is a bigger factor in concentrating the food supply chain (earlier post here), but regulation certainly matters at the margin.
No Japan Trip for Me
I was supposed to leave on Saturday for a trade show in Japan to sell peanut butter. I had looked forward to posting shots of the trip here.
What we've heard is that the Japanese have embargoed all US products containing peanuts. This means we wouldn't be able to provide samples, and probably would be prohibited from even showing our product.
Given that we are about to see another flood of product called back because of the FDA's pursuit of product from PCA's Texas plant, the Japanese position seems sensible. Who knows what will be on the FDA web site next?
Our Japanese retailers have been kind enough to contact Japanese officials and see if we can slip through this net, and we've provided the officials with assertions that we make peanut butter here from raw peanuts. But the answer is no. I'm disappointed, but I understand.
Bankruptcy Causes More PCA Confusion, Delay
This morning the papers are reporting for the second time that all products from the PCA Texas plant are being recalled. I say second time because officials in Texas had previously announced such a recall on February 12.
So, what's up with that? It appears to me that some food manufacturers, knowing that they had purchased from PCA in Texas, stepped up in the days following the initial recall and called back product. Others, it seems clear, waited. The questions is Why?
My assumption is that many food makers waited because the legal authority of Texas officials ends in Texas. So without pressure or a public announcement from the FDA, or from officials in their own states, they sat on their hands.
Meanwhile, in Texas, state officials were apparently waiting for PCA to step up, open their records, and start contacting their customers. PCA, in bankruptcy, had no reason to do that, and maybe under the bankruptcy laws have been prevented from doing so.
Meanwhile, the FDA was indeed following up with manufacturers who purchased from the Texas plant and goading those who had into issuing recalls. But the public did not know about this, because the agency never issued a public statement or updated its web site to indicate in any way that they were following up on the Texas recall.
I found out last Friday. A supplier who had earlier assured us in a letter that it had purchased no product from the Blakely, Georgia PCA plant issued a press release recalling two products made with peanuts from the Texas plant. We spotted this soon after it was posted on the FDA's site.
We immediately pulled the one product we had purchased (bulk milk chocolate peanuts) from our retail stores and secured our inventory. I then called our local FDA office and our regional FDA recall coordinator in Detroit. By the end of the day we had our own press release out, which hit the Michigan media around 5 PM.
With the new announcement things might start moving a bit faster, but more than a week has been lost.
Add Us to the List…..Sigh
This morning we checked the FDA web site as we have been doing several times every day. We discovered that one of our suppliers, who had previously confirmed that they had no product from the PCA plant in Blakely, did in fact buy peanuts that originated in the PCA Texas plant. One of those products, milk chocolate covered peanuts, is an item that we buy and then sell from behind the candy counter in our two retail stores here in Grand Rapids. (We don't sell this item in any other way.)
Thankfully, there are no reports of illness associated with this item, which was distributed nationally by our supplier to many retailers. The manufacturer's press release also says that the product and their plant tested negative.
So add us to the ever-growing list of folks forced to call back products. As soon as the FDA gets our information up on their website, I'll plug in a link to both our notice and to that of our supplier.
Very Cool, But Also Horrifying, Chart from the FDA.
This chart of where PCA product went is amazing. Note that this is the "simplified" chart.