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

It was a year ago on August 23, 2008 that some of our products were linked to the death of 22 Canadians and made many others very ill.

This tragedy was a turning point in our history. It’s very important that we always remember the impact of what happened on the people affected and their families and friends, and what that meant for us as the company responsible.

We make food to feed thousands of people every day and that places an enormous trust upon us. We thought we had very good food safety practices before this tragedy. We thought we were doing the right thing by going way beyond government requirements of us. Clearly we were not doing enough, and our failure had terrible consequences.  

We have gone to great lengths over the past year to address gaps in our food safety system and progress well down the path of true leadership in this area. We have step changed our food safety program, from testing to sanitation to incorporating new technologies like Ultra High Pressure and antimicrobial ingredients. We have a level of food safety vigilance that is demonstrating excellent results, even in the face of imperfection. It involves people at all levels in the organization each and every day. And we have detailed the further actions required to move from best in Canada to global leadership.

Today we are a significantly stronger company. We have a deeply rooted commitment to excellence in food safety - it is what we must do to honour the lives lost and people affected by the tragedy of last year. It is never easy being a leader…the two subsequent recalls we have had this year in our packaged meats business have proven that. No matter what we do, we will never be perfect; nor is anyone else. But holding ourselves to a higher standard means we will act more quickly and more assertively when there is a potential food safety concern - even a small one.

We are not going to deviate from this commitment to excellence. My greatest hope is that we will be known as the company that remembered history and learned from it, and as a result sets the gold standard in food safety.

We recalled some product this week due to trace amounts of Listeria. It was a completely precautionary action, directly as a result of the massive amount of testing we are doing. Our systems worked!

But Mother Nature has a bacteria called Listeria that is literally “everywhere”. Please consider these facts:

First, that for all practical purpose, 100% of all food establishments have Listeria. Second, even with excellent food safety advances, experts say that on average in North America one out of 200 meat and poultry products will contain low levels of Listeria. It’s even higher for other ready-to-eat foods. Third, because it is everywhere, the more you test, and the more aggressively you test, the more Listeria you will find, which is a good thing, not a bad thing - when we find it we can take action; proactive and precautionary action. Rest assured it is much easier to do the minimum, to not test aggressively and not find it. But, that doesn’t make the food safer.

Does the fact that Listeria is everywhere mean our food supply is not safe? Absolutely not. This has existed at very, very low levels for thousands of years and the vast majority of children and adults are immune. Vulnerable people, when exposed to high concentrations, get very sick which is what occurred in August of 2008 when 22 people died. But, when we take precautionary steps now, it isn’t the same at all. It is to avoid this very thing ever happening again. Painful; but truthful.

I will confess that when I read some of the blog entries on certain web sites, my heart sinks. I read messages like “shut them down…” and “can’t they get this right; I will never buy another Maple Leaf product again”. There are thousands of people in these plants who care very deeply about this and who are working tirelessly to do the right thing. They have taken the challenge of being a food safety leader to heart.  We are getting it right!

But, as any parent would understand, if you demand perfection when perfection is just not possible, often the pendulum swings the other way. Quite frankly, if our team behaves in the most precautionary way and the outcome is as some bloggers suggest - “shut them down; don’t buy their product” - then the punitive message to all those who are not acting in such an open, transparent, precautionary way is equally clear.

I am asking you to support the thousands of people who are doing an amazing and passionate job, acting with the utmost of care, even if they can’t beat Mother Nature completely, and support proactive, precautionary actions by responsible companies.

In the early hours of this morning, Maple Leaf announced a voluntary recall of a number of wiener products. This has many people asking “why another Listeria recall – can’t Maple Leaf get it right?”

It’s a fair question.

The truth is that the events of last summer and the events of this week could not be more different.

In spring of 2008, our food safety practices were not nearly as good as they are now. We thought they were good then, but we were wrong. Our testing program allowed a serious accumulation of Listeria in one of our slicers to go undetected. By the time of the recall, food had gone out of our plant with enough Listeria in it that 22 Canadians died.

Following the tragedy of last summer, Michael McCain committed to making Maple Leaf Foods a world leader in food safety. I was hired as the Company’s Chief Food Safety Officer to make sure we put in place a world class program and with the authority to shut any plant, any time, if I think it isn’t safe enough.

In the past year, we have taken many actions to live up to that promise:

1. New methods of sanitization that are the best practices in the world
2. Extensive employee training on food safety and Listeria control
3. Implementing new technologies that can either eliminate Listeria in the package, or reduce its growth during storage if it happens to be present.
4. Doing far more aggressive testing than regulations require to find Listeria and eradicate it.

Despite all that, we have another recall???

Actually, it’s because of the testing protocol that we have another recall. Listeria is a common bacteria – it can be in virtually 100% of refrigerated food plants. It also exists at low levels in one out of every 200 ready-to-eat food products and even higher levels in many other foods we eat. Last August we had a concentration of Listeria in some of our products that was enough to make some people sick, and others died. We know a lot more now – we test more for Listeria, find it more and act more. And that’s a good thing for food safety.

Our environmental testing regime told us there was Listeria on a line in a wiener plant. Finding positives is a part of a well run environmental testing program. The process includes baseline levels of testing, enhanced levels of sanitation and testing, quarantine procedures and product testing. Each of these components is important to the process and in this case all components of this process were working exactly as designed and in compliance with the new CFIA Listeria directives. Upon receipt of positive results we immediately informed the federal government through the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They felt upon assessment of our routine data that it was necessary to take additional tests. When this was done, out of over 230 products sampled, three were confirmed positive based upon the information we have to date. We recalled the product in this case to be ultra cautious.

This creates a real dilemma for us. I have to be frank with you. Nothing we can do – nothing anyone can do – will completely eliminate Listeria from the food supply. Listeria is found in about 0.5% of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products based upon best estimates from the USDA. This percentage means that one out of every 200 packages is likely to be positive. I know consumers might prefer that this number was zero, and food safety professionals certainly strive for this goal. Eliminating potentially harmful contaminants entirely is every food scientist’s Holy Grail. But being able to do that in a typical food processing plant is very difficult, if not impossible to do. The best we can do is get ever-closer – to work constantly to keep the level of Listeria as low as we know how to get it.

One thing that can improve our situation is have access to more rapid testing methods already widely used in the U.S. and Europe.

In Canada today, it takes on average about a week to get the results of a Listeria test. So if a test in a ready-to-eat food shows a potential food safety problem, the only way to address the problem is to recall the food … as much of it as hasn’t been eaten yet. Rapid testing done by labs in each plant cuts the time from a about one week to a day or two, providing us with information that allows us to act sooner at the plant. Maple Leaf will act immediately to implement rapid testing at our prepared meat plants when approved – and is pushing for government approval of these more rapid testing methods.

While faster testing will reduce the time that it takes for us to respond to Listeria when we find it, it does not eliminate the fact that it will be present from time to time. There are limitations to all test methods, and re-testing of products that have already passed a rigorous testing protocol may result in occasional subsequent positive findings, as was this case in this recent recall. There has undoubtedly been food on the market with greater concentrations of Listeria than the food we just recalled. However, consumers didn’t know about it and neither did the manufacturers or the regulators, because there wasn’t enough testing to find it. Our programs are designed to aggressively test and when we do, find it and act on it. We think that is the right thing to do.

Canadians have trusted us, and now we have to trust them. We will err on the side of caution and do what is needed to place consumers first. I know it’s complicated and no one likes risk or recalls (especially us), but we need people to understand that the real risk is no action.