Nature’s Variety: How to do a recall right
No food or drug can ever be made 100 percent safe, and that’s a fact.
I’m OK with that, because life can’t ever be made 100 percent safe, and that’s a fact, too. Honestly, who would want life to be 100 percent safe? Not me, for sure, because that would be awfully damn dull.
I know that even under the best of circumstances food will occasionally be contaminated and need to be recalled. I can forgive a company for that, although my level of forgiveness will vary depending on how likely the company was to know that there was a problem, and how much of the resulting problem was due to accident, or to a decision after doing the math that a few dead pets (or people) weren’t worth the cost of making changes.
When there is a problem, though, I expect — no, I demand — that a company make a real, true and honest effort to let everyone know about it, not dump-and-run a media release late on a Friday night. I want the information front and center on company’s Web site, and I want to see that the company is making at least as big an effort to get bad product back as they did to market their goods in the first place.
And then I want a company to be honest about what happened, how it happened, and have a plan for getting the problem fixed so the problem — at least not that problem — won’t happen again.
With all that in mind, I say this: Nature’s Variety is a case in point of how to handle a recall right.
They never hid their recall notices — always the first thing you saw on their Web site. They reached out to retailers, purchasers, media and bloggers to make sure the word got out. And now, they’ve reviewed their internal manufacturing process and are making changes:
… Nature’s Variety now uses High Pressure Pasteurization on our Raw Frozen Diets as a unique process to kill pathogenic bacteria through high-pressure, water-based technology. Having incorporated this state-of-the-art technology on our Freeze Dried Raw products in late 2009, we were able to confidently implement the process universally on all Raw Frozen Diets after the February 11, 2010 recall in order to further enhance food safety. Nature’s Variety also utilizes a test and hold protocol to ensure that all High Pressure Pasteurized Raw Frozen Diets test negative for harmful bacteria before being released for sale.
Let’s repeat that:
Nature’s Variety also utilizes a test and hold protocol to ensure that all High Pressure Pasteurized Raw Frozen Diets test negative for harmful bacteria before being released for sale.
You know what makes me sad? That this sort of thing is news, not standard operating procedure in the food industry. I have hope, though, that it increasingly will be. Or that we can make sure it will be, by law.
In the meantime, kudos to Nature’s Variety for behaving in such an overtly responsible way.
Dog Behavior Training | steveniam | March 11, 2010
