Natural Food Selection: CEO Charles Sweat: Commentary.
What I like is the quote from Natural Selection Foods, CEO Charles Sweat " While we have food safety practices in place we need to move to a new level of food safety".
Hmmm. it sounds like Mr. Sweat needs a call and products from PDSC!
Any volunteers willing to try and contact this company?
An order and PR from Natural Selection Foods would take this stock price to levels unseen!
Good Health To All.
Investor100
AN JUAN BAUTISTA, California (AP) -- State health officials said Thursday that they still hope to find the source of the contaminated spinach that's sickened at least 189 people, but called on farmers to be more diligent about applying food safety measures to prevent future E. coli outbreaks.
The recent nationwide outbreak, at least the 10th traced to produce from California's Salinas Valley during the last decade, shows that growers have not done all they could to safeguard their crops and the public's health, said Dr. Kevin Reilly, deputy director of the prevention services branch of the California health department.
"Good agricultural practices are pretty well understood. The key is going to be consistency and doing that 100 percent of the time in 100 percent of the farms," Reilly said. "One breakdown of that process can create the next outbreak." (Watch broader food safety questions -- 1:58external link)
Meanwhile, the produce processing company at the center of the current E. coli outbreak announced Thursday that it would test a sample from each lot of greens its packages for illness-causing bacteria.
Natural Selection Foods CEO Charles Sweat said the new system is modeled after sampling procedures that helped reduce the number of human E. coli infections caused by beef. Natural Selection Foods LLC is a privately held company.
"While we had food safety practices in place, we need to move to a new level of food safety," Sweat said.
As of Thursday, state and federal health officials had found E. coli in nine bags of Dole baby spinach supplied by people who had fallen ill. All nine bags were packed on Aug. 15 at a Natural Selection Foods plant, Reilly said. From the company's records, inspectors think the tainted greens came from at least one of nine farms in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Clara counties.
Sweat said during a news conference that recent testing of the company's San Juan Bautista processing plant by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the California Department of Health Services showed the facilities are clean -- an assertion Reilly said was not true.
"As of today, the California Department of Health Services has not cleared the processing facilities in the investigation," he said during a conference call with reporters.
The two agreed, however, that farmers must bear more of the responsibility for making sure the produce they grow does not come into contact with E. coli from irrigation water, fertilizer, animal droppings or unclean human hands.
"There is something different about the Salinas Valley or possible practices there that is resulting in environmental contamination," Reilly said. "In the meantime, we need to work very closely with the farmers to implement these preventive measures."
Results from tests conducted at the nine farms are not yet available. Tracing the tainted greens back to the individual fields is difficult because spinach from different growers is mixed together before being packaged, Sweat said.
Besides testing produce for signs of contamination when it comes in, Natural Selections plans to develop food safety guidelines for the farmers whose produce it washes and packages, Sweat said. The new protocol will include audits on growers, internal audits on company staff and the enforcement of sanitation guidelines for farm equipment and packaging supplies.
Sweat said the company also will reach out to the people who were sickened by spinach packaged by their plant and offer to reimburse their out-of-pocket medical expenses.
"We know there are people out there who have suffered," he said. "It's the right thing to do."
