12/10/07 Food Safety

Food Safety. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Food safety is something that we pretty much take for granted but when something happens to our food supply, it has major consequences. Take the spinach recall last year due to e. coli. Spinach was pulled off shelves and many people still are not comfortable eating it. Charles Sweat, President of Earthbound Farms Natural Selections was there when his company was singled out. SWEAT: We were in the process of working with the FDA at the time of the outbreak and we were one of the companies that they were modeling the "best practices" on because we had been in the business 20 some odd years and never had a food borne illness outbreak in leafy greens. Sweat says after the outbreak and consequently the recall, they spent a great deal of time investigating where the contamination came from. SWEAT: Throughout the investigation that occurred starting in the fall of '06, there never was a definitive explanation from the investigation both on our internal investigation, third party scientist that we hired and the FDA and the government's investigation of what the vehicle of transmission was that caused the e. coli. The same bacterium was found on a cattle ranch a mile away but they don't know how it got from one point to another. What most people don't know is exactly how small the area was that was affected. SWEAT: This spinach field that it appears the contaminated spinach came from was a 50 acre plot and that was a one acre piece that was harvested. One acre. To put that into perspective our farm production on an annual basis, we're somewhere around 38-thousand acres and we had one acre that it appears contaminated spinach came off of. Sweat says that after the outbreak they decided to take a very hard look at every aspect of their business and to learn as much about the types of contaminations as possible. SWEAT: Food safety to me should never be a competitive advantage. What you learn should be shared at large and it should  if it helps the industry in that commodity, it helps the whole industry in its business model. And one of the things that we've don in our company is the more we've learned through this crisis, we've been very open book about it and shared. I've had many of my competitors come through our facilities and study our new changes and out food safety program. I have a VP of food safety and quality that spends as much time with our competitors, educating them and learning about what they're doing so collectively we can develop the "best practices." Tomorrow we will continue looking at food safety issues. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.