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Family's juice-box ordeal highlights food-industry woes: Expert
By Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News ServiceApril 4, 2010 5:02 PM
OTTAWA — In Johnny's mind, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
The boy didn't want his classmate to get sick, so he walked right over to him, took the juice box and poured the drink down the drain.
"The teacher scolded him for it, but he didn't want that child to drink the Dole juice," says Jennifer DeGroot, whose children, Johnny, now 9, and sister Jessica, 6, are still battling parasites the family believes are linked to juice they consumed.
More than 100,000 Strawberry Kiwi Dole juice boxes were eventually destroyed last year following a government investigation showing a container-integrity problem with the boxes during distribution. Weakened boxes can become bloated and leaky, making them magnets for bacteria and yeast.
Newly released internal documents from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency about the affair reveal a food-safety system far from perfect, where flags during distribution might not have come to light had it not been for one determined family.
And a leading food-science expert who reviewed the agency's final report into the matter says the case demonstrates an ongoing problem in the food industry.
"It was obvious to me that what they actually have, on paper, a system in place to detect the quality control of packaging, but they didn't actually practise what they preached. . . . It was more a case of the company, when a defect did occur, not acting upon it. That's very common in the food industry," said University of Guelph food science professor Keith Warriner.
The challenge for large companies like Dole is to keep close tabs on its subcontractors, the specialist in microbial physiology said.
"A lot of companies are subcontracting. Economically, it makes sense because if you subcontract, you don't have to pay for facilities. But if you haven't got control, it can literally collapse an organization so you've got to be careful," said Warriner.
The ongoing saga began in May 2008, when DeGroot did what millions of parents across the country do every week: head to the grocery store, in her small Ontario town of Waterford, and stock up on juice boxes to keep her kids hydrated during the school day.
The DeGroot kids went through 12 boxes in the pack of 40. The perfectly healthy kids were then hit with a bout of diarrhea.
That's when the family noticed the remaining boxes were leaking and had a putrid smell. There was also a small worm on the exterior of one of the boxes. The parents immediately called the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
CFIA initially looked into the DeGroot case, but did not test the juice because the agency did not find a link between the kids' illness and the juice.
That's because their family doctor ran stool sample tests and diagnosed the kids with Dientamoeba fragilis infections. The parasite cannot live outside of the body for more than 48 hours, indicating that fecal-oral was the likely route of transmission, not a food product, CFIA records show.
"From the analyses that were conducted, our conclusion was that these two must be unrelated," Catherine Airth, CFIA's associate vice-president of operations, reiterated in an interview.
The agency did identify the worm as a Black Scavenger fly — larva that "lives in excrement and various decaying animal and plant material."
The Strawberry Kiwi juice boxes on the pack were leaking, but CFIA chalked up this problem to an isolated incident, "possibly due to freezing of tetra packs."
The matter was closed, but the health problems with the DeGroot kids continued. Meanwhile, a more nuanced diagnosis for the kids emerged, indicating the possibility of a connection between the juice and their elevated yeast levels and the disruption of the normal gut flora due to an initial entamoeba infection.
That's when Bill Mason, watching his distraught daughter tend to his two sick grandkids, stepped up pressure on CFIA.
Mason provided six fresh juice box samples to CFIA and demanded a more thorough investigation.
"I was helpless and it was only out of anger that I kept going," says Mason, who also filed an access-to-information request to review CFIA's records.
When CFIA tested additional juice boxes provided by the family, turns out there were problems with the packaging during distribution.
The tetra boxes failed CFIA's leak test. Yeast, lactobacillus and aerobic gram positive rods were also detected in the juice.
CFIA, which oversaw the destruction of 2,613 juice cases, identified a mechanical defect at the seam, leaving the boxes vulnerable to weaken if handled improperly.
And they were handled improperly during a distribution system with either weak Standard Operation Procedures or none at all in place, according to the followup investigation.
Like other multinational food companies, Dole has a co-packing arranging for its branded juice boxes. In this case, a company based in Mississauga, Ont., manufacturers the Dole juice and partners with two other companies to get the juice boxes to the distribution centres of large Canadian retailers.
Rick Holley, a microbiologist and food safety expert at the University of Manitoba, said stacking pallets during warehousing exposes a possible food safety risk because it can compromise tetra juice boxes, providing an opportunity for enterprising bacteria to slip through tiny holes.
"You don't want bacteria to get into that product. Mother nature is just terribly resourceful. It doesn't take very long when we make an unwitting error in terms of a new process to get a new bacteria causing a problem, and that adaptation doesn't take very long at all, particularly in this environment, where there is no normal microbial competition."
In an interview, Hany Farag, Dole's vice-president of quality assurance, said the company conducts regular audits of its local partners. In the wake of the investigation, Dole also "reinforced our expectations with the warehouses to make sure that the product is not mishandled. We do everything we can to make sure this product when it leaves the factory is 100 per cent according to our specifications."
And as a result of the investigation, the company now requires its packing and distribution partners to report immediately any damaged products instead of waiting weeks months as part of inventory control reporting.
At the end of it all, one thing is for sure: Dole juice boxes are banned from DeGroot household — and their lunch boxes.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Leaky+juice+boxes+highlight+problems+with+Canadian+food+industry+Expert/2762665/story.html#ixzz0kBUlycod
By Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News ServiceApril 4, 2010 5:02 PM
OTTAWA — In Johnny's mind, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
The boy didn't want his classmate to get sick, so he walked right over to him, took the juice box and poured the drink down the drain.
"The teacher scolded him for it, but he didn't want that child to drink the Dole juice," says Jennifer DeGroot, whose children, Johnny, now 9, and sister Jessica, 6, are still battling parasites the family believes are linked to juice they consumed.
More than 100,000 Strawberry Kiwi Dole juice boxes were eventually destroyed last year following a government investigation showing a container-integrity problem with the boxes during distribution. Weakened boxes can become bloated and leaky, making them magnets for bacteria and yeast.
Newly released internal documents from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency about the affair reveal a food-safety system far from perfect, where flags during distribution might not have come to light had it not been for one determined family.
And a leading food-science expert who reviewed the agency's final report into the matter says the case demonstrates an ongoing problem in the food industry.
"It was obvious to me that what they actually have, on paper, a system in place to detect the quality control of packaging, but they didn't actually practise what they preached. . . . It was more a case of the company, when a defect did occur, not acting upon it. That's very common in the food industry," said University of Guelph food science professor Keith Warriner.
The challenge for large companies like Dole is to keep close tabs on its subcontractors, the specialist in microbial physiology said.
"A lot of companies are subcontracting. Economically, it makes sense because if you subcontract, you don't have to pay for facilities. But if you haven't got control, it can literally collapse an organization so you've got to be careful," said Warriner.
The ongoing saga began in May 2008, when DeGroot did what millions of parents across the country do every week: head to the grocery store, in her small Ontario town of Waterford, and stock up on juice boxes to keep her kids hydrated during the school day.
The DeGroot kids went through 12 boxes in the pack of 40. The perfectly healthy kids were then hit with a bout of diarrhea.
That's when the family noticed the remaining boxes were leaking and had a putrid smell. There was also a small worm on the exterior of one of the boxes. The parents immediately called the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
CFIA initially looked into the DeGroot case, but did not test the juice because the agency did not find a link between the kids' illness and the juice.
That's because their family doctor ran stool sample tests and diagnosed the kids with Dientamoeba fragilis infections. The parasite cannot live outside of the body for more than 48 hours, indicating that fecal-oral was the likely route of transmission, not a food product, CFIA records show.
"From the analyses that were conducted, our conclusion was that these two must be unrelated," Catherine Airth, CFIA's associate vice-president of operations, reiterated in an interview.
The agency did identify the worm as a Black Scavenger fly — larva that "lives in excrement and various decaying animal and plant material."
The Strawberry Kiwi juice boxes on the pack were leaking, but CFIA chalked up this problem to an isolated incident, "possibly due to freezing of tetra packs."
The matter was closed, but the health problems with the DeGroot kids continued. Meanwhile, a more nuanced diagnosis for the kids emerged, indicating the possibility of a connection between the juice and their elevated yeast levels and the disruption of the normal gut flora due to an initial entamoeba infection.
That's when Bill Mason, watching his distraught daughter tend to his two sick grandkids, stepped up pressure on CFIA.
Mason provided six fresh juice box samples to CFIA and demanded a more thorough investigation.
"I was helpless and it was only out of anger that I kept going," says Mason, who also filed an access-to-information request to review CFIA's records.
When CFIA tested additional juice boxes provided by the family, turns out there were problems with the packaging during distribution.
The tetra boxes failed CFIA's leak test. Yeast, lactobacillus and aerobic gram positive rods were also detected in the juice.
CFIA, which oversaw the destruction of 2,613 juice cases, identified a mechanical defect at the seam, leaving the boxes vulnerable to weaken if handled improperly.
And they were handled improperly during a distribution system with either weak Standard Operation Procedures or none at all in place, according to the followup investigation.
Like other multinational food companies, Dole has a co-packing arranging for its branded juice boxes. In this case, a company based in Mississauga, Ont., manufacturers the Dole juice and partners with two other companies to get the juice boxes to the distribution centres of large Canadian retailers.
Rick Holley, a microbiologist and food safety expert at the University of Manitoba, said stacking pallets during warehousing exposes a possible food safety risk because it can compromise tetra juice boxes, providing an opportunity for enterprising bacteria to slip through tiny holes.
"You don't want bacteria to get into that product. Mother nature is just terribly resourceful. It doesn't take very long when we make an unwitting error in terms of a new process to get a new bacteria causing a problem, and that adaptation doesn't take very long at all, particularly in this environment, where there is no normal microbial competition."
In an interview, Hany Farag, Dole's vice-president of quality assurance, said the company conducts regular audits of its local partners. In the wake of the investigation, Dole also "reinforced our expectations with the warehouses to make sure that the product is not mishandled. We do everything we can to make sure this product when it leaves the factory is 100 per cent according to our specifications."
And as a result of the investigation, the company now requires its packing and distribution partners to report immediately any damaged products instead of waiting weeks months as part of inventory control reporting.
At the end of it all, one thing is for sure: Dole juice boxes are banned from DeGroot household — and their lunch boxes.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Leaky+juice+boxes+highlight+problems+with+Canadian+food+industry+Expert/2762665/story.html#ixzz0kBUlycod