Maple Leaf Responds to Bartor Road Corrective Actions
November 9th, 2009 by Dr. Randy HuffmanCanadian Press (CP) issued a story yesterday about corrective action reports issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) 14 months ago, after an inspection at our Bartor Road plant.
The average reader must be wondering how this plant could have so many issues only a month after re-opening from causing one of the worst food safety crises in Canada.
In the wake of the listeriosis crisis this plant was one of the most scrutinized plants in North America. Before it re-opened it required the approval of both Health Canada and the CFIA, which it received in September. After re-opening it was inspected daily by a team of inspectors from CFIA as well as from Maple Leaf. As part of these ongoing and rigorous inspections, issues were identified, acknowledged and documented. It is the documentation from a few of these inspections in October and December that became the subject matter of today’s CP story.
The CFIA and Maple Leaf determined at the time that there was no food safety concern. What this very detailed inspection process provided was an early indicator of potential issues in the plant that need to be corrected. And we corrected them. Immediately.
Over the past 12 -14 months- since these inspections were conducted - we have invested over $5 million in upgrades at the Bartor Road plant. This includes repair of floors and wall surfaces, air handling systems, caulking, better separation of raw and cooked areas of the plant, new pallets and new slicing and packaging equipment. We have implemented over 200 new operating procedures.
Most importantly, we have instituted an intensive program to train our staff and instill in them the belief that food safety must be the number one priority. We continually train every one of our plant employees on our new procedures, which are based on the best food safety practices in North America.
Government inspections and the corrective action plans that result are an essential part of our food safety system. CFIA generates these reports and so does Maple Leaf, through our own inspections across all our plants. We welcome this government scrutiny. Canadians hold us to a higher standard, as they should. Our responsibility is to do our absolute best and to respond immediately where inspections reveal areas where we can improve.
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When you say “Most importantly, we have instituted an intensive program to train our staff and instill in them the belief that food safety must be the number one priority.” doesn’t that contradict Michael McCain? You say you’re now trying to instill in your staff that priority, but didn’t McCain state, last year when saying “guilty” that food safety represented the cornerstone of MapleLeaf corporate structure?
You guys are producing a tons of communication materials, working on many fronts with many messages and different voices. Better ensure consistent messaging or don’t be surprise of the level of public scepticism.
Thank you for your comment. Food safety has always been a priority at Maple Leaf but since the events of last August we have made significant progress to raise the bar and embed a food safety culture across the company. Over the past 12-14 months since the inspections in question were conducted, we have invested over $4 million in upgrades including facility improvements and new equipment. We have also implemented over 200 new operating procedures which are based on the best food safety practices in North America, and continually train every one of our employees on these new procedures.
Today we are a significantly stronger company with a deeply rooted commitment to excellence in food safety. What this means is a culture that is focused on ALWAYS seeking to improve in this area. We aspire to be leaders in this field, which requires us to constantly seek out new ways to get better. I hope this helps understand our perspective.
Michael McCain
A company the size of yours is bound to have something fall through the cracks on rare occasions. I have no hesitation in continuing to purchase your products as I have done for many years. Thank you.
Maple leaf foods should look at new state of the art food safety tests , such as vacci test . They now have a test for e-coli that is 50 time more sensitive than any other test out there . the enrichment time is 6 hours and the sample takes 45 seconds to read . Same shift testing , more accurate , more sensitive and cheaper for everyone . They are getting sammonila through the testing stages know .
We have made a strong commitment to utilizing global best practices and adopting emerging food safety technologies to ensure we provide consumers with safe, great tasting food produced in a safe environment. For instance, for our Listeria testing program we currently use the fastest test method approved by Health Canada (HC) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). We have been strongly recommending that HC and CFIA move quickly to review and permit other methods that provide equal levels of sensitivity and specificity to our current methods, but provide results in shorter turnaround times. We are evaluating one such Listeria method right now and would move quickly to adopt it, if the results would be acceptable to government regulatory bodies. We recognize that faster results allow our facilities to react sooner to the data, which is critical to continuously improving our programs.
We are aware of the E. coli method that you refer to and like all new technologies for testing, we are monitoring their development and approval process closely. Thanks for the information.
I STILL do NOT trust Maple Leaf products.
I have switched to unprocessed meats. This way I am NOT getting the salts and chemicals that are in processed meats.
I know the food industry wants us to eat more chemicals from Monsanto.
Instead eat MORE fresh fruit and veggies.