Maple Leaf Canada experienced every manufacturer's worst nightmare in August 2008. That was the month the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency received laboratory results that established a link between some of Maple Leaf's meat products and an outbreak of listeriosis in four provinces. "Within minutes of being informed of this link, we immediately closed our Toronto site as a precautionary measure," says Ron Judge, vice president of food safety and quality assurance at Maple Leaf. He was speaking at the 8th Annual World Food and Technology & Innovation conference in Rotterdam.
The outbreak claimed a total of 23 lives. Victims were immune-compromised people living in retirement homes and hospitals. "The tragic event changed the face of our organisation," says Judge. "We are now over one year into the recovery process and have been trying to rebuild consumer confidence during this time But this process cannot be rushed and we expect it to take another 1218 months." Maple Leaf Canada comprises four manufacturing ready to eat, four poultry and three pork slaughter facilities.
The outbreak cost the company more than $50M (Canadian dollars) through: a major recall; lost sales; lost processing time when the site was closed for nearly a month; replacing machinery; and implementing a new health and safety regime. This figure does not take into account the amount of money paid to victims and lawsuits filed against the company, which runs into tens of millions of Canadian dollars.
After closing the site on August 23, 2008, it was opened again under enhanced protocol on September 12, 2008. The firm replaced all the slicers that were found to be contaminated with listeria. It also created a new role and appointed Dr Randall Huffman as chief food safety officer. He launched a three-year food safety programme across the business and established a permanent recall team.
The team comprises 15 employees. At 8.30am every morning they have a conference call to review the pathogen results from each of the Maple Leaf sites. Judge estimates that it has taken over 100,000 swabs from the beginning of 2009. As well as these measures, Maple Leaf also undertakes mock recalls at least twice a year. "This is something that every organisation should be doing," he adds.
"At the time, we also opened four contact centres across the country because we were inundated with calls from concerned consumers." In total, the company has received over 70,000 calls and, on average, it is still receiving one or two calls a week asking about the safety of the brand. The volume of calls received was partly the result of an advert that Maple Leaf launched on cable TV, which later received over 40,000 hits on You Tube. In the advert, the chief executive officer Michael McCain apologised to the families of those who had died or been infected.
In the first 10 days of establishing that the Toronto site was responsible, Maple Leaf was also heavily featured in the media and the company's name was mentioned 1,008 times in print, 1,959 on the broadcast media and 233 times online, Judge says. "We allowed the media into the factory during the clean-up operation, as we thought that the best approach was to be as transparent as possible. An incident like this is the worst nightmare that any food manufacturer could face. We were all in hell and some of our employees even went to see counsellors to try and help them get over the tragedy.
"Despite everything that happened, we now consider the plant to be one of the safest in the world, considering all of the extra precautions and procedures that we've put in place. We would absolutely avoid getting into any remotely similar situation."
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