Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9307090012
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Sandra Brown Kelly
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When the woman scooped into her Kraft and noticed the foreign object, she touched off an investigation that already has a paper trail from Roanoke to Richmond, Baltimore, Chicago and Atlanta.
And after the file is closed it will be kept at least five years as are those of the 20,000 or so cases the Food and Drug Administration investigation offices handle annually, said Gary Pierce.
Pierce is director of investigations in the Food and Drug Administration's Baltimore district that serves Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. This is his office's first condom-food case. Condom cases generally have to do with the failure of the birth control devices.
Before the Bedford case got to Pierce and was assigned the unfortunate-no-pun-intended ID letters of BLT, it came to a state office in Roanoke and from there was referred to offices in Richmond.
An agent for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs was the first in the chain of investigation. His role: He looked in the jar and verified that the object was a condom.
The half-filled jar was then picked up by a courier for Kraft Co. in Chicago and sent to its research labs. If officials want to see the jar again, they can. At this point, Kraft is not active in the investigation, however.
The remainder of the research will be done by the Atlanta FDA offices.
Consumer complaints eventually end up at the district office that has control of the plant where the product was made.
The mayonnaise was made in a Georgia plant, Pierce said.
He also said the mayonnaise case is a tough one. The mystery to solve is how did the condom get in the jar. Did it happen in the store? At the plant? Or did it happen some other place in the distribution chain?
Pierce said investigators know so far:
The consumer doesn't remember if the jar had a plastic shrink wrap seal around the lid or not when she bought it.
She had the jar about a month before she noticed the object in it.
The mayonnaise had been used at several family cookouts.
The jar had been opened several times in the consumer's house.
In the next step of the investigation, agents will visit the plant to see if there is some point in production where someone could slip a condom into the process.
The investigator also will try to find out if there are any disgruntled employees at the plant.
"In a production operation there are filters. We may find when we go to Kraft that a condom couldn't have gone through the filling line and gotten into the bottle," he said.
If someone is found to have tampered with the mayonnaise at any point - plant, warehouse, store, the Bedford home - he or she would be charged with a crime. If the finding is that the plant is not using proper manufacturing practices, the FDA can get an injunction against the company to force it to secure its processes.
It's possible the case will never be solved, however.
"These isolated incidents of foreign objects are tough to run down," Pierce said.
The mayonnaise incident, while unpleasant, was not life-threatening. Some of the cases Pierce and other agents handle are potentially dangerous.
He and his staff take turns being on call on weekends. If they get a case that could be dangerous for a consumer, they start the investigation at any hour of the day or night.
If it's "a stick in my beans" complaint, he makes sure the food and its container are kept secure and that the consumer is OK and waits until Monday to look into it.
His office gets from 1,000 to 3,000 complaints a year from a variety of sources including consumers, police and retail stores. Agents in his office also are responsible for inspecting 3,500 manufacturing facilities.
Pierce said the number of complaints can be very different from year to year because tampering complaints tend to come in clusters.
An example of this are the recent allegations of needles being found in cans of Pepsi. Pierce's office alone is investigating 15.
Pierce, who has 22 years with the FDA, said the work for his office changed when tamperings started with the cyanide-in-Tylenol cases that resulted in deaths of consumers.
Those also made him look more carefully at products he buys for himself, he said.
Pierce said it is probably impossible to produce a tamper-proof product. "We can't go much further than child-tamper proof or no one would be able to open the item."
The "tamper evident" packaging that we have would make it obvious if someone did a sloppy job of breaking into a package or jar, but "if someone is real smart, he can get by the system," said Pierce.
"You need to rely on yourself. If you open something and it doesn't look right - if a pill is a different shape or color than the others in the package, if the top of the peanut butter isn't smooth or if the mayonnaise doesn't have an undisturbed surface - don't use it," he said.
Report it.
by CNB