Recalls making us sick, or are we sick of recalls?

Today a front page article in the Washington Post indicates a new study shows that the US is experiencing "Recall Fatigue"

"One recent study found that 12 percent of Americans who knew they had recalled food at home ate it anyway. After Hasbro recalled the iconic Easy Bake Oven in 2007 because about two dozen children had gotten fingers stuck in the door, the toymaker received 249 more reports of injuries over the following six months. One 5-year-old girl was so seriously burned that doctors had to partially amputate a finger."

As Gina points out over on the Pet Connection Blog, this seems like a "Dump and Run" to me. What is a "Dump and Run" you ask? Well, a "Dump and Run" recall is a recall that is issued very late on a Friday, as in Friday evening, so that the recall gets minimal press coverage. This one was even worse, because they did it before a 3 day holiday weekend. Merrick issued a recall last Friday on it's Beef Fillet Squares. The recall details are here in a previous post. There has been a lot of speculation on both sides this week. Did they know about this earlier or was this unintentional? Hard to tell.

There seems to be two contributors to this "Recall Fatigue". One is this type of corporate behavior. I'm not really making the claim the Merrick's behavior was ill repute, but enough companies have done this to warrant the question. There are plenty of good examples out there of how to execute a recall.

The second is QA. Taking shortcuts across your production line is not a very good way to minimize the amount of QA failures you have. Not cleaning your equipment between production runs - like how does salmonella reach a product that is baked and never is an original source of salmonella in the first place? It has to be either the production line or the packaging equipment that was not properly cleaned in between runs or never cleaned at all. Companies are being forced to to more amounts of QA testing these days, but they really aren't making the necessary production processes or methods to prevent test results from showing the problems. Hiding, retesting because you believe the results are false positive, and trying to minimize recall impacts by "Dump and Run" tactics are all shortcuts that do not address the problem.

Corporate responsibility has got to start to look at taking the high road, because yes, I am sick of all of the recalls myself, I am sick of sorting through them all, but that doesn't mean I don't need to read or act on them. I want them to stop happening in the first place. The "cheap way out" is no longer going to cut it as our global food economy starts to become more transparent. Hiding, misinformation and misdirection may have been the way of the past, but it will be the way of the dodo bird before too long. The longer companies engage in these tactics the faster you are planning your own funeral. There are too many choices and things are becoming too transparent to make this your corporate strategy.