Tyson Foods, Inc., based in Dexter, Mo., is voluntarily recalling approximately 8.5 million pounds of ready-to-eat chicken products that may be adulterated with Listeria monocytogenes, according to the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Tyson has been working closely with USDA on this recall, and while the company says there is no conclusive evidence that the products were contaminated at the time of shipment, the recall is being initiated out of an abundance of caution.

The frozen, fully cooked chicken products were produced between December 26, 2020, and April 13, 2021. The products that are subject to recall are listed here. View the labels here.

The products subject to recall bear establishment number “EST. P-7089” on the product bag or inside the USDA mark of inspection. These items were shipped nationwide to retailers and institutions, including hospitals, nursing facilities, restaurants, and schools.

On June 9, 2021, FSIS was notified of two people who were sick with listeriosis. Working in conjunction with the CDC and state public health partners, FSIS determined there is evidence linking the Listeria monocytogenes illnesses to precooked chicken produced at Tyson Foods.

The epidemiologic investigation identified three listeriosis illnesses, including one death, between April 6, 2021, and June 5, 2021. During routine sample collection, FSIS collected two precooked chicken samples from two establishments that are closely related genetically to Listeria monocytogenes from sick people. One of the samples was collected at Tyson Foods.

USDA is continuing to work with federal and state public health partners to determine if there are additional illnesses linked to these products.

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In a historic agreement, Blue Bell Creameries agreed to plead guilty to charges that it shipped contaminated products linked to a 2015 listeriosis outbreak and will pay $19.35 million in fines, according to the Justice Department.

This is the second-largest agreement ever to resolve a food safety case, behind only last month’s landmark Chipotle Mexican Grill agreement to pay a $25 million fine over food safety violations.

Under terms of the plea, Blue Bell agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of distributing adulterated ice cream products and pay a criminal fine and forfeiture amount totaling $17.25 million. The remaining $2.1 million in fines was earmarked to resolve civil False Claims Act allegations regarding ice cream products manufactured under insanitary conditions and sold to federal facilities.

“American consumers rely on food manufacturers to take necessary steps to provide products that are safe to eat,” said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division. “The Department of Justice will take appropriate action where food manufacturers ignore poor factory conditions or fail to abide by required recall procedures when problems are discovered.”

James F. Neale, a partner in McGuireWoods LLP, currently serves as co-chair of the firm’s foodborne illness litigation practice group and notes this agreement was important for several reasons. “First, it represents another criminal prosecution for Food Drug & Cosmetic Act violations,” he says. “Those violations have been illegal for more than a century, but it’s really only in the last decade or 15 years that the federal authorities have exhibited much appetite for criminally prosecuting companies responsible for large-scale foodborne illness outbreaks.”

Second, he continues, the agreement illustrates the difference between food manufacturing and other industries. “We normally don’t prosecute companies when planes fall out of the sky, or air bags fail to deploy,” Neale adds. “The Blue Bell prosecution emphasizes the very high stakes involved in manufacturing and distributing food under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act. Selling adulterated food is illegal and the federal government appears determined to continue to criminally prosecute these violations.”

Third, says Neale, the Blue Bell prosecution makes it clear that the government will pursue larger companies, whether public (like Chipotle) or private (like Blue Bell), for 21 USC 331 violations.

The Texas-based ice cream manufacturer’s former president, Paul Kruse, was also charged by the Department of Justice with seven felony counts in connection to an alleged scheme to cover up the listeria violations.

Individual Crimes

Neale says this illustrates that the Department of Justice will continue to pursue individuals for crimes, as was announced in the “Park Doctrine” and recently re-emphasized in the “Yates Memo.”

In 2015 Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates authored a memo entitled “Individual Accountability for Corporate Wrongdoing.” It announced a DOJ policy focused on individuals within corporations who may have done wrong, and made very clear that “to be eligible for any cooperation credit, corporations must provide the department all relevant facts about individuals involved in corporate misconduct.”

“That appears to be playing out here,” Neale says. “I am unfamiliar with the evidence against Mr. Kruse, but the charges against him individually appear to represent an example of the Yates Memo policy being implemented. A deal for the company likely involved cooperation by the company in the DOJ prosecution of Mr. Kruse.”

Donald A. Shindler, co-leader of the food, beverage and hospitality group at Clark Hill in Chicago, says that Blue Bell made a mistake with its actions, and took the wrong public relations approach. “I think the Department of Justice is hammering these companies hard when they don’t do a little more self-reporting and a little more ‘let’s get to the bottom of this quickly,’” he says. “What the DOJ really raked Blue Bell over the coals with was they had some rumblings as early as 2013 from the investors saying they had to do better sanitation, and when this happened in 2015, they quietly pulled the two products off the shelf and didn’t tell wholesalers or retailers. Two weeks later, a third product was found contaminated with listeria pathogens and then the regulators got involved.”

The message, Shindler says, is, “Don’t sit on it, make the public know, and make an early recall.”

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The CDC, FDA, and public health and regulatory officials in Florida, Maine, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas are investigating a multistate outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes infections linked to hard-boiled eggs after seven people were confirmed to be infected with the human pathogen.

The illnesses, which have resulted in one death and four hospitalizations to date, were traced to Almark Foods’ facility in Gainesville, Ga. During a routine inspection in February, FDA collected two swabs from the facility’s peeling room that identified the presence of Listeria. The pathogen was then found to be genetically identical to two cases of human illness dating back to 2017 via whole genome sequencing and information collected in the PulseNet system, the national molecular subtyping network of public health and food regulatory agency labs coordinated by the CDC that identifies possible outbreaks.

Almark Foods is not currently manufacturing hard-boiled eggs at its Gainesville facility, according to FDA spokesperson Corrine Newhart, and the investigation continues to pinpoint possible products that may contain eggs from the facility. Several of those sickened reported eating hard-boiled eggs in deli salads purchased from grocery stores and in salads eaten at restaurants, according to the CDC. Last week, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) expanded the recall of products to include ready-to-eat packages of hardboiled eggs, cheese, and meat to an already long list of retail, pillow pack, pouch pack, frozen diced, and protein kit products.

“Almark Foods has conducted recalls of their consumer and bulk product and additional recalls have been conducted for downstream products containing recalled eggs,” says Newhart, citing more than 30 brands that may contain products with contaminated eggs. “Retailers should no longer be selling recalled product. However, recalled products from Almark Foods have ‘best if used by’ dates through March 2, 2020. A full list of recalls associated with this outbreak is available on our website.”

Every year, approximately 1,600 are infected with listeriosis, resulting in around 260 deaths, according to CDC estimates. Those most at risk are pregnant women and their newborns, adults aged 65 and older, and people with weakened immune systems.

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New research funded in part by the Frozen Food Foundation reveals a possible solution for controlling Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) in food manufacturing facilities. The findings were published in the Jan. 24, 2019, Scientific Reports.

The Cornell University study focused on developing and testing a computer model that has the potential to pinpoint locations in a food manufacturing facility where Lm might be found. The model—which Cornell researchers named Environmental monitoring with an Agent-Based Model of Listeria (EnABLe)—would allow food production safety managers to then test these designated areas for the bacteria’s presence.

“Our organization and industry are focused on better understanding potential entry points for Listeria in frozen food facilities, ultimately leading to specific food safety protocols,” said Donna Garren, PhD, executive vice president, Frozen Food Foundation. “Lm is a challenge because of its ubiquity and ability to survive freezing temperatures. Cornell’s innovative work opens a new, predictive model for the frozen food industry to better understand and develop more robust food safety programs for detecting and minimizing the presence of Lm.”

“Illness stemming from frozen foods is extremely rare. But we want to do our part to prevent a listeriosis event from occurring,” Dr. Garren added.

During the study, researchers entered all relevant food production data into EnABLe, including historical perspectives, expert feedback, details of food manufacturing equipment used, and its cleaning schedules, the job functions, and movement of materials and people within and from outside the facility.

“The goal is to build a decision-support tool for control of any pathogen in any complex environment,” said Renata Ivanek, Cornell University associate professor in the department of population medicine and diagnostic sciences and senior author of the paper. “While a single person could never keep track of all this information, EnABLe connects data and potential sources of Lm contamination with approaches for risk mitigation and management.”

While the study describes Listeria spp. on equipment and surfaces in a cold-smoked salmon facility, insights gained from seeing patterns in the areas where Listeria spp. is predicted can inform the design of any food manufacturing facilities and Lm-monitoring programs.

“This is a novel tool to simulate and design food safety systems to traceLm on equipment and food manufacturing facilities,” said Dr. Garren. “This research allows Lm to be traced in ways that haven’t been done before that will allow frozen food manufacturers to make science-based decisions when developing environmental monitoring programs and managing food safety risks in a complex environment.”

Dr. Garren added that the Cornell study will continue into 2019. The model will now be applied to and tested in select frozen food facilities as the next step in a potential industry-wide rollout.

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“It’s the worst documented listeriosis outbreak in global history.” So says microbiologist Lucia Anelich, PhD, principal of Anelich Consulting, Pretoria, South Africa, of the devastating public health crisis that has tallied a mindboggling 1,056 cases and 214 deaths as of July 4, 2018.

According to the South African Department of Health, the source of the outbreak that began in January 2017 has been identified as a bologna-like sausage known as polony. The implicated product containing the outbreak strain was traced to Enterprise Foods in Polokwane.

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South Africa said on March 5 producers of cold meat products were to blame for delays in tracing the cause of the world’s worst listeriosis outbreak, which has killed 180 people in the past year.

As shoppers queued up to return processed meat items and demand refunds, shares in the biggest food firm in Africa‘s most industrialized economy, Tiger Brands, tumbled because of its link to the outbreak that has spread since January 2017.

The government, which has been criticized for taking too long to find the cause, had on March 4 linked the outbreak to a meat product known as “polony” made by Tiger’s Enterprise Food.

It also said it was investigating a plant owned by RCL Foods that makes a similar product, whose shares also slid on March 5 before recovering.

Both companies, which say they are cooperating with the authorities, suspended processed meat production at their plants after health authorities ordered a recall of cold meats associated with the outbreak from outlets at home and abroad.

The U.N. World Health Organization called the outbreak the largest ever recorded globally, after 948 cases were reported since January 2017. Listeria bacteria cause flu-like symptoms, nausea, diarrhea, and infection of the bloodstream and brain.

South Africa’s Health Ministry said the source was found after pre-school children fell ill from eating polony products traced to processed meat producers.

“The meat processing industry was not cooperating for months. They did not bring the samples as requested. We had long suspected that Listeria can be found in these products,” the ministry’s communications director, Popo Maja, told Reuters.

“It is not that we are incompetent, or that we have inadequate resources,” Maja said when asked why it had taken more than a year to find the cause of the listeriosis.

He said all firms in the industry were being examined.

South Africa’s processed meat market grew about 8 percent in 2017 to a retail value of $412 million, according to Euromonitor International. Tiger Brands has a 35.7 percent market share, followed by Eskort Bacon Co-Operative with 21.8 percent. Rhodes Food, RCL Foods, and Astral Foods each have less than 5 percent.

Tiger Brands, Eskort, RCL Foods, Rhodes, and Astral said they had complied with all requests from the health authorities.

Lawrence McDougall, the CEO of Tiger Brands, said there was no direct link between the deaths and its cold meat products. “We are unaware of any direct link,” he told a media briefing.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi had said on March 4 the outbreak had been traced to a Tiger Brands factory in the northern city of Polokwane.

The authorities are also examining a second Tiger Brands factory and have not said when they could conclude tests on RCL Foods, which has a plant under investigation.

Rhodes said it produced processed canned meat, different from the cold processed meat made by rivals. Astral said it produced fresh and frozen chicken, not polonies and items linked to the outbreak. Both those firms said their products were safe.

Fast food chain owner Famous Brands said it was recalling ready-to-eat meat products from its retail outlets.

Cleaning Frenzy

The minister told South Africans not to consume any ready-to-eat processed meat due to the risk of cross-contamination.

The announcement prompted a frenzied clearing and cleaning of the shelves by local supermarkets chains Shoprite, Pick n Pay, Spar, and Woolworths, which also urged consumers to return the meats for refunds.

Neighboring states acted swiftly. Zambia banned imports of South African processed meat, dairy products, vegetables, and fruit. Mozambique and Namibia halted imports of the processed meat items and Botswana said it was recalling them. Malawi stepped up screening of South African food imports.

Shares in Tiger Brands sank as much as 13 percent, before recouping some losses to close 7.4 percent lower at 393.38 rand. RCL Foods fell more than 6 percent but later recovered to trade down just 0.5 percent at 17.11 rand.

Dozens of customers lined up outside a Tiger Brands outlet with bags of cold meat products and demanding their money back.

“I lost trust with Enterprise. I’ll be scared even if they say this problem is solved. I would rather go back to peanut butter and jam,” said call center agent Tshepo Makhura, 37.

Deline Smith, a 57-year-old housewife with three full bags, said: “I hope my grandchildren are going to be okay because we gave them food over the weekend from these parcels.”

Analysts said profits at the two firms were unlikely to be hit hard. Standard Bank analyst Sumil Seeraj estimated the recall would cut operating profit at Tiger Brand’s value-added foods division by 6 percent at most.

“The big hit is going to come with inventory write-offs because they are recalling all these products. That’s most likely where they will lose because the inventory write-off will affect operating profit from that division,” Seeraj said.

The Enterprise unit of Tiger Brands had “a very strong brand in meat,” he said, adding: “In the short-term consumers will switch to other forms of protein.”

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The FSIS released its “FSIS Best Practices Guidance for Controlling Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) in Retail Delicatessens” that discusses steps retailers can take to prevent listeriosis associated with the consumption of certain ready-to-eat foods that are prepared or sliced in retail delis and consumed in the home, such as deli meats and deli salads. FSIS encourages retailers to review the guidance and evaluate the effectiveness of their retail practices and intervention strategies in reducing the risk of listeriosis to consumers from these meat and poultry deli products. The agency will consider all comments submitted and will revise the best-practices guidance as necessary.

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Fruit linked to unprecedented listeriosis outbreak sparks renewed efforts to ensure produce safety

In September, when Steve Patricio learned of the Listeria outbreak traced to cantaloupes from a farm in Colorado—an outbreak that killed 29 people as of Nov. 9, sickened dozens, and caused one miscarriage—his mind immediately raced back two decades to a similar outbreak.

In the summer of 1991, more than 400 people in the Western United States developed Salmonella after eating tainted cantaloupes. In that case, the original source of the outbreak was never identified, although many suspected a grower in West Texas, who in turn pointed the finger at Mexican farms. No one died in that outbreak, but the cantaloupe industry took an enormous hit—just as it’s doing now.

“At the peak of the outbreak, demand for cantaloupes decreased by 60%,” said Patricio, chair of the California Cantaloupe Advisory Board. “Retail buyers believe that consumers are still walking past the product, and probably for good reason. There’s no way to adequately apologize for or explain (29) deaths and a hundred-plus illnesses. We’ll deal with the fallout from this for a generation.”

On Oct. 19, the FDA released a report indicating that the outbreak—the first-ever listeriosis outbreak associated with fresh, whole cantaloupe—was an outlier incident, primarily attributable to unsanitary conditions in the packing facility at Colorado grower Jensen Farms. The report found:

• A truck used to haul culled cantaloupe to a cattle operation was parked adjacent to the packing facility and could have introduced contamination into the facility;
• The packing facility’s design allowed water to pool on the floor near equipment and employee walkways;
• The packing facility floor was constructed in a manner that made it difficult to clean;
• The packing equipment was not easily cleaned and sanitized; washing and drying equipment used for cantaloupe packing had previously been used for post-harvest handling of another raw agricultural commodity; and
• There was no pre-cooling step to remove field heat from the cantaloupes before cold storage. As the cantaloupes cooled, there may have been condensation that promoted the growth of Listeria monocytogenes.

A third-party auditor had also failed to cite Jensen Farms for any of these conditions in a glowing report after a visit to the facility in August—less than a month before the outbreak began.

But even if you consider Jensen Farms a “bad apple” in the produce trade, the safety of cantaloupes remains a persistent challenge for the industry. “Netted melons like cantaloupe grow on the ground and can come in contact with pathogens in non-composted fertilizer or through handling,” notes a report from the University of Wisconsin. “Unlike other fruits, cantaloupe are not acidic and readily support the growth of pathogens once they are sliced open.”

Craig Wilson, Costco’s vice president of food safety and quality assurance, has been characteristically candid in calling for stricter cantaloupe safety measures. In a late September New York Times article, he called for growers to get more aggressive about pathogen prevention and detection in cantaloupes and said Costco would consider setting standards for how melons are grown, cleaned, and handled.

“We want to move that type of testing to cantaloupe. It seems to make good sense to us, and to the vendors that we talk to, for the supplier to know the microbial quality of the fruit he’s putting into commerce.”

—Craig Wilson, Costco’s vice president of food safety and quality assurance

“Doing the same things that we’ve been doing for the last 10 years and expecting a different outcome isn’t the right thing to do,” he told Food Quality.

So what will Costco be calling for? First, said Wilson, the firm wants a finished-product testing program, much like programs that are now applied to ready-to-eat foods. “We want to move that type of testing to cantaloupe. It seems to make good sense to us, and to the vendors that we talk to, for the supplier to know the microbial quality of the fruit he’s putting into commerce.”

Wilson added that Costco is evaluating intervention strategies. “For example, we have some companies looking at steam pasteurization, surface pasteurization of the cantaloupe. That seems to work really well.” It’s an approach that’s been employed with beef carcasses ever since 1993’s deadly outbreak of E. coli in the Western states, in which four children died after eating tainted meat from Jack in the Box restaurants. Wilson, then in charge of special projects at Frigoscandia Equipment in Bellevue, Wash., worked with colleagues there to develop the steam pasteurization process.

“When we were doing the beef studies, we also tested cantaloupe,” he said, noting that the Jack in the Box outbreak occurred just two years after the Salmonella outbreak in cantaloupe. “By using steam at atmosphere, it turns to water when it goes through phase change on the surface of the cantaloupe, and it kills the bugs there. It’s pretty straightforward and efficacious, and I don’t really have an answer as to why it hasn’t been used widely in cantaloupe before. Right now, we have some pilots going on and it’s under serious review.”

Companies are also re-evaluating washing systems and what’s being used to wash the fruit. “Are they using surfactants, natural acids, or chlorine only?” Wilson asked. “And with all these intervention strategies, we also need to have something in place to prove they work. We’re asking vendors to work with us on that, and we’re getting a great response.”

But California’s Patricio said that a less-is-more approach to cleaning cantaloupes may be the best way to go—at least when it comes to melons grown in the specific growing conditions of his state—based on research conducted with the University of California-Davis in the wake of the 1991 outbreak.

“We did six years of sampling, and after that, we weren’t finding contamination even in greater risk areas, such as downwind of dairies and near corrals,” said Patricio. (The program looked for Salmonella and E. coli only—Listeria wasn’t a recognized issue at the time.) “Scientists concluded that the high heat, low humidity, and other climatic conditions in central California prevented the development and spread of those common bacteria in normal practice.”

So the researchers turned to industry cleaning practices. “At the time, there were probably 30-some shippers in California, with a dozen different techniques being used to prevent the spread of pathogens. We had elaborate wash systems, hydrocooling, deep cold and hot, hot, hot temperature—all sorts of things were being done to reduce risk,” said Patricio.

The scientists evaluated them all and concluded that most of them risked causing more contamination than they prevented. “They concluded that cantaloupes run more risk of contamination the more times they come in contact with people or common surfaces,” Patricio explained. “You want to limit human contact and get them as they are in nature as quickly as possible into a sealed container. This was a bit dismaying to those of us who had invested in elaborate systems, but field packing quickly became the norm.”

Patricio said that uncut cantaloupe with a whole, unbreached rind has a natural barrier against pathogens. “Years and years of research indicates that the rind and the biology of the melon prevent cantaloupe from uptaking bacteria into the edible portion. The best thing you can do is touch them as little as possible.”

Test-and-hold programs aren’t well suited for a product like cantaloupe, Patricio said. “They have a 72 – to 96 – hour window. If I still have product 36 hours after I pack it, I’m in trouble,” he noted. “A cantaloupe has such a short shelf life that I’ve got to get it out of the field, packaged, pre-cooled, and shipped within 36 hours. But things like steam pasteurization and other new strategies have good potential going forward.”

The Center for Produce Safety (CPS) at the University of California-Davis has undertaken a project to research and evaluate new methods for preventing cantaloupe contamination. Patricio, who became chair of CPS in June, said the California cantaloupe industry has pledged $200,000 toward this effort and is asking other cantaloupe stakeholders to match those funds.

With an additional $200,000 coming directly from CPS, Patricio expects approximately $1 million in research funding to be raised to support an independent review of options such as gases, ozone, and steam pasteurization. “We want these methods reviewed by a third party without a dog in the fight, and that’s what the Center for Produce Safety is,” said Patricio. “This isn’t going away quickly. But no matter what we do, we have to be sure to do our best to produce healthy food supply every day and every bite.”

Gina Shaw writes about the food industry in Food Quality’s weekly enewsletter.

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