As coverage of the Whole Foods Market beef recall continues, yesterday’s New York Times offered some great reporting about exactly what went wrong. Here’s the source of the problem in one short paragraph:
Whole Foods acknowledged that a code stamped on beef packages arriving at its stores accurately reflected the change in processing plants. But the grocery chain said it had no procedures in place to watch the codes on arriving meat packages, and therefore failed to notice it was getting beef from a packing plant it had never approved.
And, for the first time, Whole Foods will require E. Coli testing that surpasses what the government requires. Given what a joke the government’s mandated testing is, in hindsight it’s clear Whole Foods made a gigantic mistake by thinking no additional testing would be needed. It was probably inevitable that something like this would happen. Link.
