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Million Jars of Peanut Butter Dumped In New Mexico Landfill
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "The Guardian reports that a million jars of peanut butter are going to be dumped in a New Mexico landfill and bulldozed over after retailer Costco refused to take shipment of the peanut butter and declined requests to let it be donated to food banks or repackaged or sold to brokers who provide food to institutions like prisons. The peanut butter comes from a bankrupt peanut-processing plant that was at the heart of a salmonella outbreak in 2012 and although 'all parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue,' court records show that on a 19 March conference call Costco said 'it would not agree to any disposition ... other than destruction.'
The product was tested extensively and determined to be safe. Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold, but rejected it as 'not merchantable' because of leaking peanut oil. So instead of selling or donating the peanut butter, with a value estimated at $2.6m, the estate is paying about $60,000 to transport 950,000 jars – or about 25 tons – to the Curry County landfill in Clovis, where public works director Clint Bunch says it 'will go in with our regular waste and covered with dirt'. Despite the peanut butter being safe, Curry County landfill employee Tim Stacy says that no one will be able to consume the peanut butter once it's dumped because it will be immediately rolled over with a bulldozer, destroying the supply. Stacy added more trash will then be dumped on top of the pile. Sonya Warwick, spokeswoman for New Mexico's largest food bank, declined to comment directly on the situation, but she noted that rescued food accounted for 74% of what Roadrunner Food Bank distributed across New Mexico last year. 'Access to rescued food allows us to provide a more well-rounded and balanced meal to New Mexicans experiencing hunger.'"
The product was tested extensively and determined to be safe. Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold, but rejected it as 'not merchantable' because of leaking peanut oil. So instead of selling or donating the peanut butter, with a value estimated at $2.6m, the estate is paying about $60,000 to transport 950,000 jars – or about 25 tons – to the Curry County landfill in Clovis, where public works director Clint Bunch says it 'will go in with our regular waste and covered with dirt'. Despite the peanut butter being safe, Curry County landfill employee Tim Stacy says that no one will be able to consume the peanut butter once it's dumped because it will be immediately rolled over with a bulldozer, destroying the supply. Stacy added more trash will then be dumped on top of the pile. Sonya Warwick, spokeswoman for New Mexico's largest food bank, declined to comment directly on the situation, but she noted that rescued food accounted for 74% of what Roadrunner Food Bank distributed across New Mexico last year. 'Access to rescued food allows us to provide a more well-rounded and balanced meal to New Mexicans experiencing hunger.'"
In this litigious society, who can blame them. You can damn near guarantee that they'd have hit one bad jar in a lot that large and gotten the tar sued out of them. If you want to fix this situation and make sure it never happens again, demand tort reform in this country.
The company shut down in 2012. These were produced prior to the company's closure. This is probably not safe for human consumption at this point.
Consumer peanut butter's got a shelf life of roughly a year or two at most, generally. This stuff is on the edge of that point, if not past. A million jars of peanut butter being donated would probably sit on the shelves in a home being eaten over the course of a few months, which definitely puts it past the point where the peanut oil may begin going rancid -- and that's not accounting for all the jars that will sit in storage, probably for months if not years, waiting to be given out.
Donated food is usually donated because something was mislabelled or a pallet came loose and it wasn't suitable for sale due to damage to the container that doesn't jeopardize the product itself. This has been in storage for years. This is not suitable for donation, this is a bunch of jerks trying to make themselves look good and try to drum up donations while making a company that HAS given them donations in the past look bad because they're not giving them donations right now.
... then the news and legal worlds would turn on Costco like a pack of rabid dogs. Yes, this destruction of nutritious food seems like a terrible, horrible waste; but if there's even a chance that one single jar is tainted with salmonella, and someone gets sick, then the tone would change in a heartbeat to "heartless corporation knowingly rids itself of poisoned food". I can't blame them for playing it safe.
million jars of peanut butter
Jars of peanut butter come in many different sizes. Could you please convert the amount to Olympic Sized Swimming Pools?
Thanks.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
Clinton signed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Emerson_Good_Samaritan_Act_of_1996
So no legal reason no to donate food.
Peanut Butter landfill time....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"All parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue" isn't legally binding on anyone who might later decide to sue the company. At best it might make lawsuits harder depending on what the exact liability rules are. Furthermore, even if they win the lawsuit, fighting one will cost money and bad publicity, especially when the newspapers can use the spin "it's from a plant that was condemned for salmonella poisoning, how irresponsible can this megacorp be?"
If they give away the peanut butter, they stand to lose quite a bit with nothing to gain except a little good publicity (said good publicity going down the toilet if anyone actually sues).
There's a law that avoids liability for food donation:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-104publ210/pdf/PLAW-104publ210.pdf
Why is this going to landfill - how backward is that? Who does landfill anymore? That stuff is full of oils and proteins. It could be turned into biodiesel or put into a furnace to generate heat and electricity.
This sort of thing has happened before, and it will happen again. An even better example was when the MV Cougar Ace almost sank, and 4700 brand new Mazda cars hung at a 60 degree angle for several months. They never moved, and they were all in seemingly perfect condition.
Mazda chose to err on the side of caution, rather than risk a lawsuit. Or even worse, there was a very valid concern that they would become "Katrina Cars". A coat of paint, and they would be bundled up and sold in some other unsuspecting country. (On a side-note, the destruction process is really cool!.)
With waivers not being worth the paper they're printed on, it's simply not worth the risk of getting sued.
And finally, there's the "soft damage" to take into consideration? Remember the kid in preschool who "had cooties"? That kid KEPT those cooties, right up until graduation day in high school. Costco might never allow a single jar to hit their normal distribution system, but just the simple fact that the peanut butter even exists at all, is a risk that someone, somewhere, will say, "Whoa, Costco peanut butter might have salmonella."
Play "Telephone" with that for a while, and suddenly Costco can't pay someone to take a jar of peanut butter. This is actually a very safe, very beneficial tactic for Costco.
Now consumers can be absolutely guaranteed that they will never have to think about whether Costco peanut butter is safe.
And in retail, that's money in the bank.
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The underlying story may be this:
1) We don't know what actually happened between Costco and the testing facilities and suppliers. Even though samples were tested, there could be a concern that there were problems in the food that was not tested. Costco has not handled the public relations about this incident in a sensible manner: Costco officials did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
2) Costco has become poorly managed since James Sinegal is no longer CEO.
Ten years ago, Costco was wonderful. It was easy to make decisions about buying anything we saw at Costco, because someone else had been careful to stock only reputable products, products that people would buy if they had done serious research. Now we have to do our own research.
Costco employees still praise James Senegal. They sometimes criticize the poor quality of items that Costco now stocks.
Why on Earth do you think that the appropriate way to punish the bigwigs making these decisions is to make the employees' lives harder?
Please don't do this Costco will not be affected by it, you'll just be inconveniencing and aggravating the staff who will have to restock them.
In true Slashdot spirit, I've only read the summary, but even that was enough to tell me that Costco is doing the right thing here.
The jars are not sealed. They might test OK now, but by the time the food banks get through the stock, who knows what organisms have made the jar their home.
Dumping $2.6 million worth of editable food
Damn, I thought they said it was read-only peanut butter.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Even though samples were tested, there could be a concern that there were problems in the food that was not tested.
There is actually a principle in the regulation of food and pharamceuticals that you can't "test quality into a product."
You build quality into a product by controlling the manufacture, and testing really just serves as a confirmation that all went well.
There is no way to sample peanut butter such that you can be certain that there isn't a microbe in the part of the peanut butter you didn't test. Now, you can make that risk fairly low as you sample more and more, but if there was reason to suspect the integrity of the product in the first place then you can imagine the lawyers lining up.
And, as others pointed out, if they give away product for free they still face liability, make no money, and potentially undercut their own sales. If some poor guy dies of salmonella you can imagine the tales of a company feeding them peanut butter that they'd already determined isn't good enough for ordinary people...
Quite. People are ready to lynch Costco for applying some sort of standards to what they will buy and put on the shelf. They will reject things that Walmart will happily accept. This is by no means the first time. This is probably not the first pile of food to be "wasted" because Costco chose to err on the side of safety.
I can understand why they simply don't want to be associated with the listeria outbreak factory. It boggles my mind that ANY ONE here wants to push the issue.
Even if they've tested this stuff, I would still be suspicious of it just because of where it came from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Back in the day (1980s), I helped run an emergency food pantry in Southern California. At the time, Sol Price (founder of Price Club, which I believe is one of the constituent chains that merged to become CostCo) donated pallets of dried milk to us to redistribute. In general, these were pallets where there had been damage, so some of the packages were not usable - the vast majority of the packages, however, were fine.
At our pantry, that donation made up a substantial part of what we gave out to people, especially those with children.
I always thought it was both generous and great business sense for them to donate that food. After all, Price Club got a tax write off, there was less waste, and the hungry people got food without it impacting Price Club's sales.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
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