Since August 2008 twenty-one Canadians have died after eating Maple Leaf deli meats contaminated with Listeria.  We all watched in horror as the worst food safety crisis in modern Canadian history rolled across the country.

There are six different kinds of Listeria.  Five of them are harmless.  The sixth, called Listeria monocytogenes is also safe if food is thoroughly cooked.  Healthy children and healthy adults are almost completely immune to Listeria, even the bad kind.  But it’s a different story for pregnant women, infants, people with damaged immune systems and the elderly. If they eat food with high concentrations of Listeria monocytogenes, they can get sick. Only about 4 in 1 million people contract listeriosis in Canada in a year. But sadly, about one-quarter of those vulnerable people who get sick from Listeria will die.

Last August’s tragedy began at our Bartor Road plant in Toronto.  We discovered after the fact – much too late – that there was a hidden spot deep within the slicing equipment that our regular sanitization missed, permitting Listeria to grow to high levels of concentration, high enough to make people sick.  It was the bad kind of Listeria, Listeria monocytogenes.  And it ended up in deli meats that were largely distributed to nursing homes and hospitals, where a vulnerable population of Canadians ate it. Twenty-one people died.

This was by far the most awful event in the one hundred year history of our company.  I can’t properly describe the overwhelming sense of grief and responsibility we all felt … I felt, personally.  You may remember seeing me on television back then, apologizing for the tragedy and vowing to develop the most comprehensive anti-Listeria program of any food company in Canada.

Food Safety Progress

We did that.

I wish this were not true, but sadly nobody knows how to eliminate Listeria from food altogether, because it exists everywhere in the environment.   But in the months after the August 2008 disaster, Maple Leaf made substantial changes to significantly reduce Listeria findings in our plants, and to manage it as effectively as any company we are aware of to protect public health. Here is what we have done so far.

• We improved sanitization. That’s the first line of defence against any food borne illness: creating a manufacturing environment in which disease-causing pathogens cannot easily grow.
• We doubled the amount of environmental testing. Even though Maple Leaf already did more Listeria testing than any other company, obviously it wasn’t enough. Testing the manufacturing environment for Listeria (and other pathogens) is the second line of defence. It gives us the opportunity to eliminate it when we find it.
• We increased the amount of food testing. That’s the third line of defence – if we find Listeria on a food contact surface in a plant, we hold product from the line and test the food if necessary. However, because Listeria appears randomly and very sporadically in the food when it is there, we have tried not to rely too much on product testing because that might give us a “false sense of security” and that would be a bad thing for food safety.
• We strengthened our product recall procedures. Recalls are the fourth line of defence, necessary when evidence of possible contamination has arisen after product has been shipped. We know that more testing means discovering Listeria more often – that is just the straight facts for any food company doing a good job of controlling Listeria. By testing more, this will always mean finding more Listeria, of course, but it also may mean more recalls. We do this because it provides better consumer protection and that, of course, is the purpose of the whole program.

To guide all these improvements we hired Dr. Randy Huffman, one of the most qualified food scientists in North America, to serve as our Chief Food Safety Officer.  With Randy’s help, we believe we now have the best Listeria-fighting program in the Canadian food industry.

None of this is said proudly. We took these steps to become best in the industry because nothing is more important than protecting consumer safety. You gave us a second chance.  Many of you came back to our products.  Some didn’t, but watched closely to see how we would perform.

We are on probation and we know it. Our obligation is to fight Listeria more aggressively than any other company and permanently hold ourselves to a higher standard.

What Safety Leadership Means

Maple Leaf has made progress in our battle against Listeria. We and the industry have to do more.

First, we intend to move toward food safety leadership more generally.  Listeria is only one of many food borne pathogens.  It’s not even the most dangerous one, measured by annual mortality rates.  We are determined to apply the same level of rigour to all harmful bacteria.

Second, we intend to spread the word. We feel we can best give meaning to last August’s tragedy by becoming Canada’s Listeria educator … even Canada’s Listeria nag.  In the months ahead, we will be unveiling a Listeria education program to inform our peer companies, our customers, the general public, and especially vulnerable populations about what we can all do to reduce the risk from Listeria. We will have unprecedented outreach to everyone that has an interest in Listeria and better food safety.

And third, we intend to set an example not just of food safety but of food safety candour.  This means being open about any problems we encounter. It also means being candid about the fact that while food is safer now than ever in the past, and will be safer in the future, it can never be 100% risk free. Of course our goal has to be perfection – zero food borne illnesses.  The industry needs to get as close to that goal as we can.  But we can never get all the way there, and the food industry needs to be open about this.

Three Recent Setbacks

In the last few weeks you may have heard some new and disquieting news about Maple Leaf’s safety performance.  I want you to have the whole truth about these three specific events.

1.  The Hamilton wiener recall.

A few weeks ago, our environmental monitoring found evidence of Listeria on a piece of equipment in our Hamilton plant. That in itself wasn’t bad news. With an intensive testing program, finding Listeria can be pretty common – the more you test for it, the more you find it.

According to our new procedures, whenever we have a positive environmental finding of Listeria on a food contact surface, we hold and test the food from the line and it won’t be released until we know it is safe.

That’s where we messed up.  There was a miscommunication within our Quality Control staff, and 26,000 packages of wieners were prematurely shipped out.

So we had to recall the wieners.  Subsequent testing indicated that there actually was NO Listeria monocytogenes found in the product, but that just isn’t the point. We shipped product that our procedures said should not have been shipped, and our commitment to these procedures is absolute. So we recalled the product, even though we were not required to.

This was a serious mistake. Obviously, having the best Listeria testing in Canada doesn’t help much if we can’t manage to keep potentially contaminated product out of the food chain. These procedures are all new, and we have made improvements to keep this kind of error from happening again.

2.  The CFIA meeting last July.

Just a few days after the Hamilton recall, another troubling story hit the media.  This one didn’t bear directly on Maple Leaf’s food safety performance – but it might have reflected on our integrity.

Late last July and before the August outbreak, Maple Leaf had a routine meeting with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to talk about food export and other routine topics.  Later, after the Listeria outbreak surfaced, reporters naturally asked about this meeting.  They wanted to know if the meeting had anything to do with Listeria.  Both Maple Leaf and the CFIA said no. In retrospect, this response wasn’t correct. We actually had discussed Listeria in the context of trade regulations, but we were thinking of it in the context of the listeriosis outbreak, which is why we answered the way we did.

Much later – just a few weeks ago – the Canadian Press obtained a set of handwritten notes from the meeting, which included a brief indication that Listeria was in fact discussed.  Given this discrepancy, the journalist rightly wondered whether the CFIA and Maple Leaf might have already known something about the outbreak at the time of the meeting, which was well before the actual outbreak.

The reporter was right to ask that question because it is important for the public to know what we knew and when we knew it. But we didn’t know about the outbreak or Listeria in our product before the August recall.

I wish Maple Leaf had been more careful when we were first asked about the meeting. But above all, I wish we had known about the outbreak as early as that July meeting, so we could have launched the recall earlier, warned the public earlier, and possibly saved some of the people who died.

3. Deaths related to the outbreak increase to 21 people

The third setback is the sad news that another death has been linked to last August’s disaster.  This involves an elderly Quebec man who got sick last November (at the latter end of the incubation period) and died of Listeriosis in January. While there is no evidence that he consumed Maple Leaf products, and this strain has occurred in other foods, the fact is the strain of Listeria was the same as the outbreak strain. We are extremely saddened by this news and the loss for his family – every related death is another extremely important reminder that food safety matters.  Lives are at stake.

Maple Leaf and Listeria

Because of last August’s tragedy, Maple Leaf now “owns” the Listeria issue.  Any news linking Maple Leaf and Listeria is and will continue to be big news.

We can’t forget that link, and we can’t ask you to forget it.  We owe more than that to the families of the people who died as a result of last August’s contamination.  We owe more than that to the Canadian public.

Even doing the best job of fighting Listeria of any food company in Canada isn’t enough … if we do it quietly. We intend to become Canada’s educator.

So I have asked our food safety leaders to start designing a national Listeria education and outreach program that seeks to engage our industry, the government, our customers and consumers. We want our industry as a whole to be better. We want government regulations to be tougher and more consistent. We want transparency to improve in our industry. We want customers who have responsibility for vulnerable populations, and consumers themselves, to better understand how to reduce risk.

Will Maple Leaf someday get past its association with Listeria?  Maybe. But for now, that’s not our goal.  To make sure the 21 Canadians who were killed by Listeria in August 2008 did not die in vain, our goal is to champion better food safety performance and better food safety awareness for all Canadians. We’re not there yet, but we are well on our way.

I ask you to watch, and to judge, as we work to achieve this goal.