March 6, 2009
NY Times
Food Problems Elude Private Inspectors
By MICHAEL MOSS and ANDREW MARTIN

When food industry giants like Kellogg want to ensure that American
consumers are being protected from contaminated products, they rely on
private inspectors like Eugene A. Hatfield. So last spring Mr. Hatfield
headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia
to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use
in things as diverse as granola bars and ice cream.

The peanut company, though, knew in advance that Mr. Hatfield was
coming. He had less than a day to check the entire plant, which
processed several million pounds of peanuts a month.

Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts
were readily susceptible to salmonella — which he was not required to
test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant to
reassure Kellogg and other food companies of its suitability as a
supplier, the Peanut Corporation was paying for his efforts.

“The overall food safety level of this facility was considered to be:
SUPERIOR,” he concluded in his March 27, 2008, report for his employer,
the American Institute of Baking, which performs audits for major food
companies. A copy of the audit was obtained by The New York Times.

Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was
ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste
for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has
become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease
in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an
estimated 22,500 were sickened.

With government inspectors overwhelmed by the task of guarding the
nation’s food supply, the job of monitoring food plants has in large
part fallen to an army of private auditors like Mr. Hatfield. And the
problems go well beyond peanuts.

An examination of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in recent years —
in products as varied as spinach, pet food, and a children’s snack,
Veggie Booty — show that auditors failed to detect problems at plants
whose contaminated products later sickened consumers.

In one case involving hamburgers fed to schoolchildren, the
Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in California passed 17 separate audits
in 2007, records show. Then an undercover video made that year showed
the plant’s workers using forklifts to force sickly cows into the
slaughterhouse, which prompted a recall of 143 million pounds of beef in
February 2008.

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as
the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour
Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide
to improve food safety.

Audits are not required by the government, but food companies are
increasingly requiring suppliers to undergo them as a way to ensure
safety and minimize liability. The rigor of audits varies widely and
many companies choose the cheapest ones, which cost as little as $1,000,
in contrast to the $8,000 the Food and Drug Administration spends to
inspect a plant.

Typically, the private auditors inspect only manufacturing plants, not
the suppliers that feed ingredients to those facilities. Nor do they
commonly test the actual food products for pathogens, even though
gleaming production lines can turn out poisoned fare.

As in the Georgia peanut case, auditors are also usually paid by the
food plants they inspect, which some experts said could deter them from
cracking down. Yet food companies often point to an auditor’s
certificate as a seal of approval.

The baking institute, which is based in Manhattan, Kan., and is also
known as AIB International, says it inspected more than 10,000 food
production sites in 80 countries last year. James R. Munyon, its
president and chief executive, said his group’s inspections were
reliable and tough, no matter who pays for them, but he declined to
elaborate on specific audits.

Kellogg officials declined to be interviewed for this article. The
company has said it is reviewing its use of private audits, including
those by the American Institute of Baking. Kellogg said it required the
Peanut Corporation to provide it with annual audits of the Georgia
facility. Kellogg has recalled more than a dozen products, including
Keebler crackers and Famous Amos cookies.

The retail giant Costco, which had already limited the institute’s
audits to bakery vendors, has now told suppliers to stop using the group
altogether.

Both the food industry and federal officials say they are aware of the
problems with third-party audits. Nonetheless, the F.D.A. has proposed
expanding the role of private auditors to inspect the more than 200,000
foreign facilities that ship food to the United States. The agency has
proposed a voluntary certification program that would toughen audit
standards and alert federal authorities of problems — an idea that has
met stiff resistance from the food industry.

Food safety advocates say that audits can play a useful role in
improving sanitation and catching problems. But in case after case, the
audits have failed to prevent major outbreaks.

In 2007, Keystone Food Products, the Easton, Penn., plant that makes
Veggie Booty, received an “excellent” rating from the American Institute
of Baking. But the audit did not extend to ingredient suppliers,
including a New Jersey company whose imported spices from China were
tainted with salmonella.

As many as 2,000 people in 19 states were sickened, according to federal
estimates. The incident prompted the New York company that sells the
snack, Robert’s American Gourmet, to add its own inspections and
regularly test ingredients for contamination.

Even when audits do turn up problems, it is up to the discretion of food
companies to fix them.

After Nebraska Beef was linked to an E. coli outbreak in 2006, officials
from the United States Department of Agriculture found that the company
had not carried out the recommendations of auditors who had identified
numerous problems at the plant in the preceding months.

Nebraska Beef has disputed its culpability in the outbreak, which
sickened at least 17 people. A company spokesman said Thursday that the
problems identified in the audit had been corrected but could not
provide documents to verify that claim.

Robert A. LaBudde, a food safety expert who has consulted with food
companies for 30 years, said, “The only thing that matters is
productivity.” He added that “you only get in trouble if someone in the
media traces it back to you, and that’s rare, like a meteor strike.”

Dr. LaBudde said a sausage plant hired him five years ago to determine
the species of bacillus plaguing its meat. But the owner then refused to
complete the testing. “I called them ‘anthrax sausages,’ and said they
could be killing older people in the state, and still they wouldn’t do
it,” he said, declining to name the company.

There are more than 200 companies and numerous independent operators in
private food inspection. Few have grown faster than the American
Institute of Baking. In addition to the peanut factories, the
organization’s 120 auditors handle clients who process meat, seafood,
vegetables, spices, oils and dairy products.

The baking institute also sells educational services to food industry
personnel; the Peanut Corporation of America said some of its employees
attended the organization’s food safety training classes. Audits provide
nearly half the income for the organization, according to tax filings
and the organization’s Web site.

Mr. Munyon, the organization’s president, said its auditors were drawn
from industry experts with vast experience in food safety. “AIB
emphasizes the educational value of its inspection procedure to the
management and employees of the facilities it provides services to,” he
said.

Mr. Munyon acknowledged that auditors were allowed to solicit contracts
from plants that they then audited, but said this posed no ethical
issues because the auditors were on salary, not paid by commission. Mr.
Hatfield first audited the Peanut Corporation plant in Georgia in 2007
after contacting the plant’s managers to solicit their business.

The American Institute of Baking’s dual role as an educator and
inspector troubles some in the food industry, as does its expansion
beyond baking audits. Before the salmonella outbreak, Costco had
rebuffed repeated proposals by the organization to inspect all its food
suppliers.

“The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig
Wilson, the top food safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a
peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”

Costco, Kraft Foods and Darden Restaurants are among a group of food
manufacturers and other companies that use detailed plans to prevent
food safety hazards. They also supplement third-party audits with their
own inspections and testing of ingredients and plant surfaces for microbes.

The American Institute of Baking was not alone in missing the trouble at
the Peanut Corporation plant in Blakely, Ga. State inspectors also found
only minor problems, while a federal team last month uncovered a number
of alarming signs, as well as testing records from the company itself
that showed salmonella in its products as far back as June 2007. Federal
health officials say there are now 677 officially reported cases of
salmonella poisoning in the outbreak, which reflects only about 3
percent of the total number of people sickened.

But the baking institute’s private audit of the peanut plant had
particular heft in assuring food makers that the processed peanuts were
safe. Plant workers, in interviews with The Times, also cited the
audits’ findings when asked why they did not pursue their own concerns
about the plant.

Another audit of the peanut plant, by the Michigan-based NSF Cook &
Thurber, raises further questions about the usefulness of private
audits. That audit found nearly two dozen problems that it characterized
as “minor,” but it nonetheless gave the peanut plant an overall score of
91 out of 100.

NSF officials said that for their audits, this was a low score. But the
company that paid for the audit, the insurance giant American
International Group, then sold the peanut company insurance to cover the
costs of recalling products, according to lawyers for the Peanut
Corporation.

Mr. Hatfield, who audited the peanut plant for the American Institute of
Baking, referred questions to the organization, which said he “is
degreed in biology” and “trained to do the job.” In auditing the Blakely
plant last March, Mr. Hatfield became concerned about his ability to
check the plant thoroughly and asked for more than the one day allotted,
according to people familiar with the audit. The Peanut Corporation
agreed to pay for the additional time, but only in future audits,
according to those people.

Mr. Hatfield checked to see that the plant had a system in place to test
its products for contamination, but the audit indicated that he did not
ask to see any test results for salmonella and therefore did not know
that the plant had found the bacteria.

“I never thought that this bacteria would survive in the peanut butter
type environment,” Mr. Hatfield wrote to a food safety expert on Jan.
20, after the deadly salmonella outbreak was made public, according to a
copy of his e-mail message. “What the heck is going on??”