Feds: Source of Hannaford beef recall may never be known

New regulations possible to require better record keeping at Hannaford, other chains

Jan 28, 2012 12:00 am

Federal regulators said yesterday that they are days away from closing an investigation into tainted ground beef sold at Hannaford Supermarkets, and that it was likely the source of the contamination would never be identified.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering new rules that would require grocers keep better records when grinding meat in-store. The goal, regulators say, is to make it easier to trace tainted meat during future outbreaks.

And while Hannaford may have violated best practices around grinding and record keeping, it appears the Scarborough-based grocery chain never violated federal regulations.

In a conference call with reporters, USDA officials said Hannaford at times used “high-risk” practices when making ground beef in its stores. The USDA also said the company’s “insufficient” records hindered the investigation into the salmonella-tainted beef, which sickened 19 people in seven states.

During the course of the investigation, officials learned that beef “trim” cut from steaks and other beef cuts was coming into contact with other “course” ground beef that it buys to grind in store, said Dr. Daniel Engeljohn, with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. The result is possible cross-contamination between different batches of ground beef.

Because the store failed to record in all instances the source of all trim used to create ground beef, it made it nearly impossible for investigators to trace the source of the contamination.

Hannaford spokesman Michael Norton said the company was abiding by all rules, and that they knew throughout the investigation that penalties or fines were unlikely.

Norton said the company has already implemented new procedures that call for grinding machines to be fully cleaned and sanitized between batches, even though the government doesn’t require them to. Norton also said there aren’t any federal record keeping requirements for retailers.

“We appreciate their frustration with their investigation, but we want the public to be clear that the facts have remained the same, and the language has gotten different as the frustration has increased,” Norton said, presumably referring to the USDA, which in recent weeks has blamed slow progress in the investigation on Hannaford’s “insufficient” records.

“We had some practices in terms of recording information in terms of what was required, and those were not fully enough in their view to support their investigation,” Norton said.

Richard J. McIntire, a spokesman for the federal Food Safety & Inspection Service, said that investigators track down the source of food-borne outbreaks around 90 percent of the time. In this case, it appears the source may never be found.

“We’ve been looking at this since the recall started,” he said, “but we have to move on in this particular case. We have exhausted all leads at this point … and from our particular perspective I think this nut may never be cracked.”

Engeljohn said many retailers followed the same meat-grinding protocols as Hannaford was using before the recall, despite federal best-practices guidelines to avoid cross contamination that had been in place for years. USDA officials hope to have new regulations around meat-grinding procedures and possibly record-keeping in place by summer.

The USDA and Hannaford announced a recall of nearly a dozen different types of ground beef sold at Hannaford supermarkets because of a potential salmonella outbreak on Dec. 17. According to the CDC, 19 people have come down with the same strain of salmonella, which has proved resistant to standard antibiotics.

Four cases have been reported in Maine, six in New Hampshire, five in New York, and one case each in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Vermont and Hawaii. Several people have been hospitalized but nobody has died from the outbreak, which federal officials believe has been contained.

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