While we on this side of the Atlantic are mostly preoccupied with how best to survive the current recession, the US food industry not only has to deal with economic woes, but is also embroiled in a crisis of confidence over the safety of the food supply. This has been brewing for some time, mostly as a result of a series of nationwide food poisoning outbreaks linked to meat and fresh produce, but the final straw seems to have been supplied by recent events surrounding contaminated peanuts.

The current storm centres around an outbreak of Salmonella food poisoning that has so far made about 700 people sick and contributed to nine deaths across 46 states. The outbreak began back in November last year, but the likely source was not identified until January when the outbreak strain of Salmonella was found in a jar of peanut butter. From then on, the outbreak investigation turned into a nightmare for the US food industry. Firstly, the source of the peanut butter was traced to a producer in the state of Georgia called Peanut Corporation of America, or PCA. Inspection of the PCA plant showed some serious hygiene problems and eventually the company was forced to recall everything it had produced since January 2007. This was bad enough, but when it transpired that PCA had been supplying peanut products as ingredients to hundreds of other food manufacturers,
the problems
really started.

At the time of writing, more than 2,100 products have been recalled, with seemingly more to come as the investigators trace more shipments. Both large and small manufacturers have been affected and the cost of recalls and lost sales is set to run into billions. PCA itself has filed for bankruptcy and is the subject of both a police investigation and a Congressional Hearing. The crisis has prompted renewed calls for a root and branch reform of the US food safety
regulatory system.

However, it is the detailed picture of what went wrong at PCA that is of most concern for Americans, and perhaps for Europeans too. An FDA inspection of the Georgia plant after it had been confirmed as the source of the problem found leaks in the roof of the factory, evidence of vermin and dirty equipment. It also allegedly found evidence that the factory management had reacted to positive Salmonella results from lab tests by sending samples for re-testing at a different laboratory in the hope of getting a negative result, sometimes releasing the batch of product concerned before the lab results were even received. But worse even than this deplorable practice was the discovery that PCA had not established that any part of its process, including peanut roasting, would effectively destroy Salmonella. In other words it had no critical control point for an obvious and
serious hazard.

Despite all this, earlier FDA inspections had apparently given the plant a clean bill of health, as had third party audits by a highly reputable food safety auditing organisation. In my view, this is why we should be concerned. Most of the manufacturers who had to undertake costly recalls of products made with potentially contaminated ingredients from PCA were relying on third party audits to assess their suppliers’ food safety and hygiene practices, as do many European food manufacturers and retailers. Of the big players, only Nestlé USA conducted its own food safety audit of PCA. Tellingly perhaps, the Nestlé audit team rejected PCA as a supplier because they were not satisfied with its hygiene and vermin control.

Of course, that does not mean that there is anything wrong in principle with a third party audit – any audit can only provide a snapshot at best of what is going on in a factory on a single day. Third party audits to recognised standards result in fewer audits overall and that is in everyone’s interests, but the PCA debacle shows what can happen if auditing fails to spot problems and there is no safety net. Perhaps Europe’s food manufacturers need to look again at how they assess suppliers and monitor their food safety practices, before we have our own PCA crisis.

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