Issue #45 2022-07-04
Human errors in food safety (one weird, one bad incident), latest COVID-and-food research, Salmonella in yet another chocolate factory, beekeepers share their perspective on honey fraud
Welcome to The Rotten Apple, an inside view of food integrity for professionals, policy-makers and purveyors. Subscribe for weekly insights, latest news and emerging trends in food safety, food authenticity and sustainable supply chains.
Updates on SARS-CoV-2 in the Food Supply Chain
Human errors in food safety - is this the weirdest food safety accident?
Linked or not? Salmonella in chocolate AGAIN this week
The Impact of Honey Fraud on BeeKeepers
Food fraud incidents and horizon scanning updates
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Hi,
Happy Monday to all, and Happy Independence Day if you are in the United States.
I’m excited to report that The Rotten Apple community reached more than 1000 subscribers last week! Thank you all so much for being part of this. (To be clear, that number includes both free and paying subscribers. This means that the many - many! - hours of time I devote to this newsletter each week remain a true 💛labour of love💛… but you’re worth it!)
Welcome to Issue 45 where I share the weirdest food safety human error accident of the year, and shake my head in wonder at another food safety error that should never have been allowed to happen. Thankfully no one was permanently hurt in either incident.
Also this week, an update on the confusing and contradictory science of Covid transmission in the food supply chain. Plus, yet another chocolate factory has shut down over Salmonella contamination, that’s the third big one this year. I discuss the possible links.
Finally, I share a podcast that tells the story of beekeepers and their thoughts on honey fraud. And for paid subscribers, a link to an interesting essay that discusses the Abbott formula fiasco from a free-market economics perspective.
As always, you will find food fraud incidents and horizon scanning news, below the paywall. Access it with a 7 day free trial (cancel any time).
Have a fabulous week,
Karen
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Food Safety
Update: SARS-CoV-2 in the Food Supply Chain
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Science is a messy beast. The latest research into Covid transmission through the food supply chain is contradictory. Here’s a quick overview.
Study One (“The Risk is Negligible”)
The New Zealand Food Safety Science and Research Centre’s latest update says all evidence still points to a negligible risk of getting the illness from touching foods or food packaging. It says there is no evidence that eating food contaminated with the virus has resulted in any infections.
Study Two (“There Might be a Risk from Food Packages”)
Chinese scientists have been surveilling frozen food packages for viral RNA. In this recently published report they say “Hence, frozen food as a source for infection and the cold chain as an introduction pathway of SARS-CoV-2 might present a risk for transmission between countries and regions.”
Note, however, that more than 55.83 million packages were screened and only 1455 of them tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, which is 0.003 percent.
https://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/doi/10.46234/ccdcw2022.105
Study Three (“There is a Definite Risk from Surfaces in Food Environments”)
This study, from the University of Arkansas, warns that “Food-related environments can pose a risk for SARS-CoV-2 transmission” and “SARS-CoV-2 can survive for extended periods on fomites (up to 21 days).” Fomites are objects and surfaces.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214799322000777
Study Four (“Viral Particles Can Survive for Ages on Cold Food”)
This study, by American researchers, tested the virus’ ability to survive on food. The researchers used viral surrogates - which are safe viruses whose characteristics are similar to dangerous viruses - to perform tests under cold storage conditions. They applied the surrogates directly to meats and fish and stored the foods at refrigerator and freezer temperatures, for up to 30 days.
The virus particles remained recoverable after 30 days, with survival better under frozen conditions than refrigerator conditions. The different foods - beef, salmon, chicken and pork - had similar results.
https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/aem.00504-22
In short: 🍏 It’s confusing 🍏 Science is messy 🍏 Some researchers assert there are significant risks from SARS-CoV-2 in the Food Supply Chain 🍏 Some suggest the risks are measurable but not significant 🍏
🍏 For previous reports about Covid in food, see Issue #2 and Issue #11 of The Rotten Apple. 🍏
Food Safety
Human Error in Food Safety … this might be the weirdest food safety accident ever. Plus someone accidentally sold recalled infant formula (?!)
Two food safety incidents caught my attention this week, because they were both caused by human error. One was weird and it’s hard to believe that it could have happened at all. One was inexcusable, the result of a series of errors that should never have been allowed to happen.
(1) A series of unpredictable human errors leads to a food poisoning outbreak
This is a weird one. In Juneau in Alaska, kids at a school were accidentally served, and then drank, construction chemicals that look like milk last month.
Something went wrong, that’s for sure. It seems that someone accidentally included containers of the construction chemical, a sealant used for floor tiles, in a bulk shipment of large bag-in-box containers of shelf-stable milk. The shipment was sent to a school district food warehouse.
The boxes of sealant looked similar to the boxes of milk in the same shipment and were not declared on the shipping manifest. They were, however, labelled with “warning notifications”.
Three schools in the district received deliveries of floor sealant instead of milk. At one of those schools, a kitchen worker poured servings of the sealant into cups that were served to students at breakfast.
Twelve students and two adults drank the sealant, immediately experiencing burning in their mouths and throats, as well as nausea and headaches. All are recovering.
What went wrong? As is often the case with food safety incidents, multiple things had to go wrong to make the students sick. The person who organised the shipment of milk first had to make a mistake. Then the person at the school district warehouse had to fail to notice the warning signs on the boxes. Then the person who served the milk had to fail to see - or fail to pay attention to - the warning signs on the boxes. And they also had to fail to notice that the liquid had a “slightly scented” chemical smell.
How do you stop such accidents? Usually, a food business should create systems that are designed to prevent human errors. However, in this case, I’m not sure it would have been possible to engineer any system to address these errors. This accident seems to have arisen from an impossibly unlikely sequence of unfortunate mistakes. Fortunately, no one appears to have been permanently harmed.
(2) A bad mistake, and entirely preventable
Unlike the Juneau milk story, the human error in this incident was entirely preventable. It’s pure luck that there wasn’t a worse outcome.
Last month, an online store in Canada called Shoppers Drug Mart had to recall already-recalled Abbott infant formula. According to the Candian government recall alert, the products had been successfully recalled by the business in February but were then sold again through online sales channels. A consumer complaint prompted the second recall.
The recall notice does not say how many units were re-sold.
Incidents like this can only happen if there are serious errors and failures within a business’s recall procedures. Any recalled product must be quarantined, labelled and isolated from ordinary stock before being returned to the manufacturer or securely destroyed. It can’t be put back into digital inventory systems – which would allow for reselling online – and it cannot be kept in areas where order-picking-packing staff could mistake it for saleable products.
The fact that this potentially dangerous product went back to consumers shows that something went very wrong at Shoppers Drug Mart.
Sources:
Food Safety
Another Chocolate Factory Shut Down Due to Salmonella (is there a link?)
This is the third chocolate factory shut down since April, what’s going on?!
First, it was Ferrero, whose Easter chocolate recall affected millions of units of product all around the world. The chocolate was linked to Salmonella illnesses and the factory initially struggled to find the source of the contamination. It was forced to shut down for a thorough investigation and deep clean.
At around the same time, another chocolate Salmonella outbreak was underway in Israel, at one of that country’s largest food manufacturers. This led to another multi-country recall, the largest in Israel’s history, according to The Times of Israel. That recall was initiated after investigators, who were investigating Salmonella illnesses in consumers, found traces of the bacterium in the Strauss Group confectionary factory.
Now another massive chocolate factory – the world’s largest – has also shut down due to Salmonella contamination. Barry Callebaut’s factory in Belgium sells wholesale quantities of liquid chocolate to 73 confectionary companies. Barry Callebaut says they detected Salmonella in a production lot and took the precautionary measure of stopping all production lines.
Is there a link between these three incidents? It’s tempting to think so. But there is no publicly available evidence to support that theory.
The Ferrero outbreak was attributed to monophasic Salmonella typhimurium, whereas the Strauss Group (Israel) outbreak was linked to Salmonella entercia and the species of Salmonella(e) found at the Barry Callebaut factory has/have not yet been publicly disclosed. That means, at the time of writing there is no clear microbiological link between the three incidents.
As to the causes of the contamination events, they also appear to be different. The Israel outbreak is being blamed on a series of serious hygiene and food safety failings at the factory. The Israel Ministry of Health said that the factory had performed maintenance activities while product was being made and that there had been a temporary, short-lived, pigeon infestation on-site, and that there had been improper milk fat thawing procedures. They also said the position of Director of Food Safety had been left vacant. If that’s not a recipe for food safety disasters I don’t know what is!
Contamination Causes
After extensive investigations, Ferrero reported that their Salmonella contamination could be traced to the filter in a tank of dairy butter.
Barry Callebaut is suggesting that their safety protocols were operating correctly and that their decision to shut down was undertaken out of an abundance of caution. They said they were able to quickly identify the source of the contamination, which was the ingredient lecithin, and that they quickly let their customers know not to ship any affected products.
Because two of the three events have been attributed to incoming (non-cocoa) raw materials, some commentators are suggesting that supply chain pressures are the root cause, but I’m not so sure. It’s more likely to be an unfortunate coincidence, in the case of Ferrero and Strauss and perhaps, in the case of Barry Callebaut, due to an increase in the frequency of Salmonella testing regimes, in the wake of the other recalls.
Where to now?
The Ferrero factory has now been cleared to re-commence production after a deep clean. It’s hard to comprehend how massive that cleaning job must have been. Cleaning chocolate equipment is difficult at the best of times, because of its incompatibility with water and its solid state at ambient temperatures.
A deep clean means cleaning every tiny pump, port, seal, sensor, filter, pipe, hose and valve in the entire factory, and then performing thousands of swab tests to confirm sanitary status after the cleaning.
Ferrero says more than 1000 people have been working to get the factory ready. They dismantled ten thousand pieces of equipment (ten thousand!), conducted almost two thousand tests, replaced “multiple” pieces of equipment and installed three hundred meters of new pipeline.
In short: 🍏 Three large chocolate processing facilities have shut down due to Salmonella contamination since April 2022 🍏 There does not appear to be any microbiological link at the time of writing 🍏 Decontaminating a chocolate factory is a massive undertaking 🍏
Sources:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/strausss-massive-recall-includes-food-products-sold-abroad/
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2022/06/ferrero-gets-go-ahead-to-restart-belgian-plant/
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/01052022-02
🍏 For more on Salmonella in chocolate, check out Issue #33 of The Rotten Apple 🍏
Food Fraud
The Impact of Honey Fraud on BeeKeepers - a Podcast Episode from Inspect and Protect Canada
Click the orange button to listen to how honey fraud affects beekeepers. A podcast by Inspect and Protect Canada.
Below for paying subscribers: An economist’s free-market perspective on what went wrong with the Abbott formula recall; food fraud incident reports; horizon scanning updates (= emerging food fraud risks you should know about); plus an audio version of this email, read aloud by the author… Check out an example to see how the email looks (and sounds) for paying subscribers here.
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