Good to see USDA/FSIS and JBS Swift USA are working on the 4th. The list of retailers is now is 82 pages long. The E. coli O157:H7 Illnesses are at least 23 in nine states.
.png)
A few days before many of us light up the barbeque, JBS Swift and the FSIS finally publish the list of retailers who received the tainted-meat (click on below).
Frankly, the retailer names had trickled out over the last few days as responsible stores alerted thier customers. Whats a bit odd, it that the location of the stores that received the meat do not seem to completely match up to where the illnesses are located. According to the CDC, twenty three persons infected with a strain of E. coli O157:H7 with a particular "DNA fingerprint" have been reported from 9 states. Of these, 17 have been confirmed by an advanced DNA test as having the outbreak strain; confirmatory tests are pending on others. The number of ill persons identified in each state is as follows: California (4), Maine (1), Michigan (6), Minnesota (1), New Hampshire (1), New Jersey (2), New Mexico (1), New York (1) and Wisconsin (6). So, begs the question? "Where is ALL of the beef?".png)
.png)
.png)
The JBS Swift USA recall of 380,000 pounds of beef contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 also involves these retailers:
The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has so far been silent about the retailers involved in the recall. The retailers that have come forward have done so on their own.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency advises that meat recalled by JBS Swift USA was sold under the President's Choice brand (steaks, roasts and ground beef) in the following stores:
Looks like JBS Swift USA has one customer coming forward on its own.
The Kroger Co. and its Fry’s, Smith’s, and Food 4 Less stores are all asking customers to check their freezers and return any beef with April 27-June 1 sell-by dates. The Smith's website has a good summary.
Kroger said it was “recalling select store-brand and store-packaged ground beef products because the beef was supplied by JBS Swift Beef Co. and may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.”
Kroger stores in the Greater Cincinnati area, including Dayton, northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana; Greater Memphis, Tenn.; Arkansas, Mississippi; Indiana (except southwestern Indiana and Evansville); Illinois; and eastern Missouri sold the bad beef.
Smith’s stores, which are located in western states, are also involved in the recall. As are Food 4 Less stores in Illinois and Indiana and Fry’s Stores in Arizona.
Kroger, with $76 billion in sales last year, is the only retail chain to acknowledge its involvement in the JBS recall of beef linked by the Centers on Disease Control and Inspection (CDC) to a multi-state outbreak of E. coli O157:H7.
The Cincinnati-based Kroger has 2,475 stores in 31 states doing business under a bunch of names.
Still nothing from FSIS to indicate whether JBS sold meat to others besides the Kroger chain.
E. coli O157:H7 originates in the intestines of cattle. Cattle, as many as 6,000 a day, are killed, processed and packed at the Greeley Beef Plant owned by JBS Swift USA.
Yet JBS says the beef products it has recalled were contaminated outside their Colorado slaughtering plant because it was their customers that through trimming and grinding turned whole muscle cuts into ground beef.
“The ground beef that might have been associated with illness was produced by other companies, who often do not use the antimicrobial intervention steps we employ in our facility to reduce the risk of the beef products, JBS spokesman Chandler Keys told the Grand Island Independent.
“Nevertheless, we have agreed to expand our recall of whole muscle cuts out of an abundance of caution for consumers,” Keys said.
JBS upped its original June 24th beef recall to at least 380,000 pounds on June 28th after the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) linked meat produced by the Greeley Beef Plant to a multi-state outbreak of E. coli O157:H7.
The attempt to shift blame to its wholesale customers who took possession of the meat produced by the JBS facility on April 21st is unusual to say the least. JBS is the third largest beef producer in the United States, and is owned by the world’s largest beef producer, Brazilian-based JBS SA.
Keys says its wholesale customers are being contacted by phone and mail. He says the company is “working closely with the USDA to ensure that product is removed from the marketplace and the recall is completed successfully.”
Chances are what’s left of this tainted meat is not in the marketplace,” but in somebody’s freezer. Unless and until it’s connected with a retail source, most people are clueless as to whether they bought the bad meat.
There’s a PDF file of the products JBS produced on April 21st that are included in the retail, but that does not help anyone much. Keys offers the fairly useless suggestion people go have a chat with the butcher at their local retail store. Lot's of luck with that one.
The solution to the problem is public release of the list of the meat-receiving retailers, something the Bush Administration began during last year’s E. coli season. Under the new Obama Administration, however, that new policy has seen spotty enforcement.
Almost a week after the JBS beef recall began, there has been no list of retailers issued by either USDA’s Food Safety & Inspection Service, nor JBS. Nothing, nada, zip.
The world’s largest beef producer is now responsible for the year’s largest E. coli O157:H7 beef-related outbreak to date in America. The entry of JBS into a dominant position in the U.S. beef industry has been both recent and quick.
Dick and Charlie Monfort, who today together lead the group that owns the Colorado Rockies baseball team, would still probably have no trouble finding their way around the meat packing plant they once owned in Greeley, CO, 60 miles north of Denver.
They might have a harder time finding the gleaming headquarters building for JBS Swift USA, which today owns that Greeley packing plant and 15 others in the United States. JBS is located in “The Promontory” as far away to the West as you can get from the meat processing facility the Monfort family sold to ConAgra in 1987 for $300 million and still be in Greeley.
What Monfort Inc. sold became ConAgra Red Meats. It was next sold to an investor group and became part of Swift & Company. Two years ago, all Swift & Company operations in the U.S. were swept up for $1.4 billion cash by JBS SA, which is today the world’s largest beef producer.
How big? JBS has the capacity to kill, process, and pack 80,000 head of cattle per day. JBS operations include 22 in Brazil, 6 in Argentina, 10 in Australia, 10 in Italy, and the 16 in the US.
From his new offices, with striking views of Colorado’s Front Range, Wesley Batista, President and CEO of JBS Swift USA, can probably get to his estate-size home in Fort Collins, CO faster than he can drive through Greeley’s clogged street traffic to the meat plant on the east side of town.
But it was in that Greeley plant that on one day in April produced the bad beef now being recalled after they were linked to the current multi-state out break of E. coli O157:H7 that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) says has made at least 18 people sick.
The Greeley beef plant has struggled with more than the turnover in ownerships since the Monforts left it to others. Even when Dick remained as a Con Agra executive, the Greeley plant suffered through a massive 19 million pound recall in 2002.
The darkest moment for the company and surrounding community came in December 2006 when federal agents raided six Swift operations in the U.S., including the Greeley plant and arrested a total of about 1,200 employees for alleged immigration violations.
Critics charged the raid was politically motivated to send a message to other employers and rounded up citizens and non-citizens alike so long as they did not speak perfect English and were not light-skinned.
That description also fits Mr. Batista, the Brazilian son of the 75-year old founder of JBS. He was took on the job of being CEO for JBS Swift USA because of his hand-on management style and experience in running beef processing plants. When he arrived in Greeley two years ago, he planned to work on his English before taking on a more public posture.
He is still working on his English, but has responded to demands to speak to cattlemen and community leaders where JBS Swift plants are located. Cattlemen are said to be less suspicious after hearing him and community leaders are downright giddy.
In addition to the new headquarters, Greeley has benefited from JBS adding a 250-truck transportation unit, expanding operations, adding shifts, and employing 1,500 more people. With two shifts going, the Greeley beef plant can process 6,000 cattle per day.
JBS Swift might have been the largest beef producer in the U.S., but the Bush Justice Department in October 2008 filed a challenge to its $560 million purchase of Kansas City-based Natural Beef. Cattlemen worried about “unbridled concentration.”
JBS pulled out of sale, leaving it No. 3 in the U.S. behind Tyson’s and Cargill. It did last year buy the Smithfield Beef Group, including the Five Rivers Cattle feed lot operation.
Now called “JBS Five Rivers,” it has ten feed yards with a one time capacity to fatten 820,000 head of cattle in four different states adjacent to the existing JBS slaughter facilities. Almost 2 million head of cattle were fattened in these feed yards in the last twelve months.
The Colorado Livestock Association heard from Batista last Friday. The beef recall had been announced a couple of days earlier, but had not yet been expanded to 380,000 pounds and connected to the multi-state E. coli O157:H7 outbreak by CDC.
If Batista mentioned the recall to the cattlemen, the Greeley Tribune reporter must not have thought it was important. What was important was talk about investment in cattle.
“Without cattle, we don't have an industry. We invested $3 billion here and we have only one raw product and that is cattle,” Batista said. “We are very optimistic and we are starting to see growth all over the world. There is some great opportunity out there and we all need to work towards that.”
Enter keywords:
See our list of services or enter your information below to send us a quick message and we'll reply in one business day or less.
Your privacy is ensured. We will never sell, disclose, or trade contact information.
