On the morning of Oct. 12, a U.S. Agriculture Department inspector at Sara Lee Corp.’s Bil Mar Foods plant in southwestern Michigan came upon a sight that few care to see anywhere, let alone in a factory that produces hot dogs and deli meat.
The inspector reported he saw three live cockroaches in a hallway near some ovens and three dead roaches on the floor. Cockroaches, it would turn out, were a recurring problem at the Bil Mar plant, requiring the services of a local exterminator three more times in an area where turkey meat gets ground up and processed.
“This area was in very poor sanitary condition,” the USDA inspector wrote in his report. “There was old meat and debris strewn across the floor. Area had not been cleaned over the weekend. Also noticed caulking in poor condition, which would lead to problems with insects.”
Roaches–and Bil Mar Foods’ failure to get rid of them–typify the frequently disgusting conditions at the Zeeland, Mich., meat-processing facility, details of which were spelled out in nearly 1,300 pages of federal inspection documents and internal company correspondence obtained by the Tribune through the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents, all recorded in 1998, describe a plant with a pervasive culture of carelessness and indolence in remedying recurring sanitation violations. And products from that plant caused a deadly outbreak of food poisoning last year, though federal health officials have not been able to pinpoint the specific source of the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria that killed 15, caused 6 miscarriages and sickened about 100 people nationwide.
Sara Lee spokeswoman Theresa Herlevsen said Bil Mar managers make it a priority, in general, to respond immediately to any issues raised by USDA inspectors at the plant. Conditions at the plant weren’t any different from any other food processor, she said. In fact, she noted that federal health officials commented during a public meeting in February that the plant was “clean and professionally run.”
But records show that federal inspectors repeatedly took Bil Mar Foods to task for substandard cleaning and sanitation procedures, poorly trained and careless workers and–perhaps the most serious violation–falsification of “housekeeping” documents in which plant employees are supposed to indicate that areas in the plant have been checked according to schedule, meet cleanliness and preparation standards and are ready for production.
The USDA has authority to effectively shut down a plant by withdrawing its seal of inspection when there are repeated violations of federal regulations that could pose a threat to public health. But agency spokesman Andy Solomon said he didn’t know why the USDA didn’t act to shutter the Bil Mar plant. As information mounted about the Listeria outbreak, Sara Lee voluntarily recalled 15 million pounds of meat in December and halted operations on its own.
Listeria can lurk in just about anything, including soil, water and dust particles. It’s especially harmful to pregnant women and their fetuses, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems.
One of the prime avenues whereby dust and other contaminants might have entered the food-processing line at the Bil Mar plant was condensation dripping from pipes onto food and equipment. It had become such a major problem that Bil Mar managers required employees to check for leaks on an hourly basis. After the USDA effectively shut down the plant in November 1997 because of condensation leaking onto meat products, Bil Mar vowed to review sanitation procedures “to identify recurring sources and areas of condensation and take immediate corrective actions necessary to remedy the situation.”
But last March inspectors observed liquid dripping from a refrigeration unit directly onto franks as they rolled down a conveyor belt to a packing machine. The packaging line was stopped as workers hung plastic under the refrigeration unit, a stopgap measure routinely used to handle condensation problems.
Over the 4th of July holiday, plant workers dismantled a chronically leaky cooling unit with a chainsaw to remove it from the building. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspects that dust kicked up during a summer maintenance project on a Bil Mar air-cooling unit may have caused the Listeria outbreak.
Whether the maintenance project spread Listeria at Bil Mar may never be known; the CDC’s lead investigator said last month that they might never have all the answers. Investigations still continue, with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Michigan cooperating with the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General to try to pinpoint the origin of the outbreak.
“Any of these (kinds of) violations could result in direct product contamination,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Indeed, based on the conditions described in the government inspection reports, Delmer Jones, chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection locals, disagreed with Sara Lee’s assessment that Bil Mar was a typical plant.
“If that’s normal, the consumer is in for a ride,” he said.
Jones said the problems at Bil Mar represent a failure of the USDA’s new inspection system called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, or HACCP. Under HACCP, plants are given greater freedom to police themselves, and inspectors are reduced to doing paperwork to make sure plant employees are properly checking meats as they’re processed. The union has sued the USDA for allegedly going back on an agreement to implement HACCP as an enhancement and not a replacement for traditional inspections.
Individual inspectors became increasingly frustrated with repeat violations at the plant, USDA correspondence shows. In an internal memo dated April 1, USDA inspector Rodney Mueller complained that Bil Mar employees tended to treat sanitary violations as someone else’s problem.
Mueller sarcastically chided Bil Mar managers about some strips of clear plastic found in meat products. The managers had claimed the presence of such material did not meet the technical definition of “adulterated” food in USDA regulations.
“If the plastic does not fall under the heading of adulterated, does the plant feel the plastic is `edible?”‘ Mueller wrote in an internal memo.
Several instances of questionable record-keeping raised the possibility that some workers were covering up inadequate safety procedures. On Feb. 13, for example, an inspector noticed that workers had altered housekeeping sheets, or checklists for monitoring cleanliness of work areas, to make it appear they were making checks more frequently than was the case. The next day, Bil Mar plant supervisors received a memo from Mary Delrue, vice president of operations, warning against false record-keeping and noting that suspicious records had been uncovered twice that week.
“Falsifying company records is a very serious allegation which could ultimately lead to criminal prosecution,” Delrue wrote.
Workers at the plant on many occasions ignored some of the most elementary food preparation hygiene, USDA documents show. On March 13, a USDA inspector watched as one employee dropped a knife he was using to gut poultry, then picked it up from the floor and continued his work. A few hours later, the same inspector saw another worker pick up and use a thermometer she had just dropped.
Inspectors found stray bits of metal along belts carrying food on several occasions and once discovered a meat core driller with jagged edges that were shedding slivers of metal. Such foreign objects may have made it into the finished product on at least one occasion, when a woman from Seattle wrote the USDA to say she had found small and shiny silver objects with jagged edges in cooked salami from the Bil-Mar plant.
Inspectors had warned Bil-Mar quality assurance officials repeatedly to take greater precautions with metal found in the early stages of processing. But the company dismissed such admonitions, promising USDA inspectors that product with metal that made its way into the market “was not a significant food safety concern that is reasonably likely to occur.”
