Our Journey to Food Safety Leadership | Our Journey to Food Safety Leadership

This week the report of the Weatherill Investigation into the listeriosis tragedy of last year was released. It reflected interviews with government, Maple Leaf, industry, and victims’ family. I said and strongly believe that there is good medicine for government, the industry and Maple Leaf in the report. I hope government doesn’t wait long to move forward with the recommendations. I know we aren’t.

Maple Leaf has never ducked responsibility for what happened. We were accountable for the death of 22 Canadians. Our company will never be the same. We have moved from shock and remorse to anger that this happened on our watch and an absolute resolve that we will have one of the best food safety programs in the world.

I attribute this disaster largely to one factor - our misplaced confidence in our food safety system that just wasn’t good enough. It’s not that management didn’t care.  We went well beyond the regulations.  We invested millions.  At the time, the Canadian government recommended a Listeria management program but did not require one.  Unlike many companies, we followed the recommendation, and we were always early adopters of new standards.  We had a detailed testing protocol for Listeria and we aggressively sanitized any location where Listeria was found. We followed our procedures rigorously and we found no violations of that. That is why it was never escalated.

But - the procedures were inadequate!

The Weatherill report rightly noted that the main thing we got wrong was failing to analyze the pattern of Listeria test findings to trace them back to root causes - like the slicing machine that was harbouring Listeria. The Weatherill report suggested we didn’t  follow our own policy. We don’t quite see it that way, but the major point is the same. What trend analysis meant to us in August 2008 was tracking the number of test positives and making sure that every one was sanitized.  We did that.  What trend analysis means to us now is daily, scientific analysis to look for repeat patterns and root causes, full management oversight, and quarantine procedures.  We didn’t do that, because - tragically - it wasn’t in the protocol. It didn’t exist in the Canadian industry or government. It does now.

Some people understandably wonder how Maple Leaf could have had Listeria positive after positive without ever warning the public that we had a food safety problem.  This is really important to understand - and it’s hard to understand, especially if you lost a loved one to Listeria. 

Yes, we had periodic positive findings for Listeria.  Every plant that tests for Listeria finds positives for Listeria.  Listeria exists in every plant, every food establishment and every kitchen - almost every day.

We knew we had Listeria in the plant as all plants do - but, not in the food. Every time we found it, we sanitized that part of the plant extra-carefully, and then we retested three times to make sure the Listeria was gone.  And we never had a repeat positive.  We believed our program was working.  We were confident that we did not have a food safety problem.  We were sure we had nothing to warn anybody about.

We were wrong, tragically wrong.  Because we never tracked our positive findings back to that contaminated slicer, we never got to the source of the Listeria - and eventually the Listeria got into some of our food. 

Would we have acted sooner if we had known then what we know now? Yes - and we could have saved lives in the process. That is something I live with every day, and because of that I will never be satisfied until we have the best food safety system in the world.  This is not much comfort to the victims and their families, I know. But it is what I can do to try to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again.