CC4Fnews

We were discussing topics for this week's newsletter when one reached out and grabbed me from an unusual source, please see below. Talk about impact, I was talking to a taco stand products processor in LA he operates 10 Mexican food shops  and he said he saw business drop the week of the recall because the name Trader  Joe's was mentioned and there in the West Coast so he thought it affected his products also. Sometimes it difficult to predict the effects of these recalls.

WASHINGTON, October 31, 2009 - Fairbank Farms, an Ashville, NY, establishment, is recalling approximately 545,699 pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced.

The products subject to recall include:

• Trader Joes
• Price Chopper
• Lancaster and Wild Harvest 
• Shaw's
• BJ's
• Ford Brothers
• Giant

For the details on the recall please click here
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Recall_059_2009_Release/index.asp

A five hundred thousand pound recall that spans dozens of products is no small matter, but compared to some of the record breaking recalls of the last few years it seems almost negligible in size.  What struck me however was how I discovered the recall.  Normally I, or one of my staff, will notice the recall in one of the trade publications or catch the release on the FSIS website.  This particular recall was faithfully reported to me by my wife, who heard it on the radio, and was checking to make sure I knew about it.  My response to her "What recall?"

Within the next few phone calls I was making I started hearing about it from my clients and prospects, but the important thing to note here is that the consumer knew about the recall as quickly as the industry did.

The window of opportunity food distributors and processors have to mitigate impact on their businesses by responding in a timely fashion to the news of a recall is growing smaller every day.  Again the rumblings of additional regulation fueled by fear of contamination are being heard.  As reported from  News8.net

"WASHINGTON - Ground beef may be responsible for more than two dozen cases of E. coli and two deaths. A ground beef recall is in effect across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Beef has been recalled from some local grocery chains, including Giant, Trader Joe's and BJ's.

After dropping for a few years, the USDA says recalls of contaminated ground beef have rebounded with at least a dozen through October 2009.

Congress has begun hearings on food safety, including more stringent inspections and a bigger role for the food and drug administration, but as shoppers ask if the beef they're buying is safe, they're starting to ask when they can see some action."

Be sure your company is the first to know about food recalls if you are not already subscribed to receive notifications from the FSIS automatically visit http://www.fsis.usda.gov/FSIS_Recalls/index.asp and subscribe.  It might irk me not to be the first to know, but it could cost you a sale if your customer calls and asks if you're affected by the recall and your answer is "What Recall?"