Spinach industry gets help from beef industry to regain consumer confidence
8:34 a.m. Friday, March 9, 2007
Herding calves and hefers is a lot different from growing spinach on a farm. But cattle may hold the key to containing all kinds of contamination.
"What can the leafy green industry learn from the way the beef industry had to deal with E.coli? I think there's a lot to be learned from what we went through with the E.coli issue," Cattle Rancher Bruce Hafenfeld said.
Hafenfeld remembers the really bad days. By 1999, E.coli was making 70,000 Americans sick each year. About 60 of them were dying.
"So much emphasis was put on beef in the mid- to late-90s, the other food industries haven't quite looked at it as rigorously as they need to," said Food Policy Institute Director Chris Waldrop.
Like beef, spinach has a middle step between farm and fork: the processing phase, where factories bring in produce from dozens of farms.
"They wash it in these big tubs," Hafenfeld said. "You get one contaminated head goes in the tub, contaminates it all."
The beef industry figured out you can't sterilize everything. But it established "chokepoints" where contaminated products can be cut out of the food chain.
"Our industry has to be engaged with the leafy green industry to ensure that we pass on to them the experiences we've had with E.coli," Hafenfeld said.
Waldrop says ranchers made a big decision to work together safety. Individual companies pooled resources and invested in new technology.
"The produce sector, I think they're going to look at those exact same things, and they need to put forth the exact same effort," he said.
It costs millions, but Hafenfeld says the effort pays off on the retail end.
"Consumer confidence is everything," he said.
And to bolster that confidence, some farmers feel it's vital to pass on what they've learned.
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