WAYNE, N.J. -- There was a time when the heads of supermarket chains didn't need to think about E. coli O157:H7, salmonella enteriditis or listeria monocytogenes.
But that time has passed, probably forever.
These days you can bet at least some big chain executives are losing sleep worrying about microbes breeding on the ground beef in their meat cases and the cold salads in their delis, waiting to be carried home and ingested by unsuspecting consumers.
Well, that kind of corporate discomfort is OK with Roger E. Stangeland, chairman of Grand Union Co. here and immediate past chairman of the Food Marketing Institute, Washington.
He is convinced his supermarket colleagues should know more, and do more, about food-borne illness. They should be talking in detail about how their companies' practices to prevent it can be improved, right now.
"Those discussions should be going on in conference rooms all over the industry," Stangeland said in an interview with SN at Grand Union's headquarters here. I can't think of anything more important than for that message to get out."
Stangeland is quick to add that he knows food safety is a priority at most of the leading chains in the country. "It is not a doomsday picture I am painting," he said. "We have individual companies that are finding solutions."
What concerns him is the lack of what he called a "synchronized" approach to the food-safety challenge -- at the retail level, certainly, and further up the distribution chain as well.
What Stangeland wants to see is an intense, total-industry effort to increase both the retailers' skill in handling fresh products and the consumers' understanding of their own crucial role in food safety.
Stangeland knows what he is talking about. During his tenure as chairman of Vons Cos., Arcadia, Calif., he and his company were dragged into a food-safety disaster in 1993, in which the E. coli virus present in undercooked hamburgers sold at Jack in the Box restaurants led to a headline-grabbing outbreak of illness, in some cases fatal, on the West Coast.
The ground beef from which those hamburgers were made was processed centrally by Vons, and Stangeland expects to be a witness in a lawsuit going to trial between Vons and Foodmaker Inc., San Diego, operator of Jack in the Box. (Now retired from Vons' chairmanship, Stangeland remains connected to the chain as a board member and consultant, and he is still active in FMI's leadership as well.)
As a veteran and keen observer of his industry, Stangeland also knows the food-safety challenge will grow in complexity because it is inextricably tethered to the expanding fresh foods trend.
"The consumer is sending the message that 'I want to buy more fresh,' and the industry should be interpreting that as meaning we need to be more alert to the fact that food safety is more at jeopardy the more we handle fresh."
The retail food industry must be ready and willing to work with the regulatory bodies of the government, but never be content to rely on the government to assure that the food safety challenge is being met.
"This is something I've come to know a lot about, painfully," he said, harking back to the E. coli incident and its aftermath.
The government, apparently in a panic, he said, publicly blamed the industry for not providing fresh product absolutely free of bacteria, and then it launched a retail testing program to search for contaminated ground beef "after the horse was already out of the barn."
It did not help the situation, in Stangeland's view. "It is foolhardy for consumers or the industry to believe that even with today's very solid food-safety technology, we can assure anybody that E. coli O157:H7 is not in some of the ground beef they buy.
"It is naturally on the carcass, on the outside or the inside. Since ground meat comes from trimmings, to a large degree, mixed in with muscle meat, if the animal is not free of the contamination at the time that the slaughtering process is complete, then the microbe stays there; it gets into some of the trim and then into the ground beef, and it is extremely hard to tell that it is there.
"You can test for it. But the current testing going on is, at best, very randomly useful, because if you find it in a single 1-pound package or five 1-pound packages, there is no way to know whether all the rest of that big batch is contaminated or not; and if you don't find it, you don't know if the package right next to the one you picked up is contaminated."
There is a fairly simple and foolproof way to guard against E. coli outbreaks, however: thoroughly cooking the meat.
"I know a lot of Americans think it is their God-given, red-white-and-blue right to eat rare or medium-rare hamburgers. The fact is, it isn't, and unless you cook them at 155 degrees for at least a few seconds all the way through, you won't eliminate the risk.
"Much of the statements by the media, and even a lot of things that have been said by all sorts of [government] agencies that ought to know better, have been misleading people to believe that it is the industry's responsibility to make sure that not one single pound of ground beef gets through with O157:H7.
"And I am telling you that unless you want to stop eating ground beef, that is not possible," Stangeland said. Not possible, that is, short of irradiating the product, a notion that Stangeland would like to see his industry more aggressively explore, despite the risks of criticism.
"It has enough potential to deserve the whole industry's absolute re-examination, to see whether or not it is an answer."
Even two years after the Foodmaker E. coli tragedy, Stangeland is still not convinced that the proper message -- thorough cooking of ground beef -- has reached consumers. "The issue was never really gotten to. There was a blue-ribbon panel, and they did some pretty good work," he noted, referring to an industry group convened by the National Livestock & Meat Board. The panel report's conclusion: "You have got to cook the product."
Stangeland said he is encouraged by the infusion of highly qualified technical talent into the managements of many chains. Are they universal? "Absolutely not. To what percent has the industry adopted the challenge, by putting these people on staff? I don't think anybody knows for sure.
"I would say that of the large chains, certainly all have some form of quality-control and sanitation programs, staffs, commitment and so on."
But the challenge is a moving target, and today's staffing and commitment might not cut it tomorrow. Especially sobering to Stangeland is not the industry's food-safety credentials at headquarters, but rather the rendering of headquarters strategy down in the trenches, where the war against food safety can be hell.
"As we get into producing in-store prepared foods, the possibility for contamination goes up dramatically -- cross-contamination between poultry and other meats; between cooked and uncooked fish and seafood -- and those are not sanitation issues, just cross-contamination issues.
"I have unfortunately seen numbers of instances where knives and other equipment have been used across the gamut of fresh product in meat departments, and I cringe when I think of that going on," Stangeland said.
On the front line there is a crying need "for more intra-organizational training in individual companies that make up the retail segment," he said. "There is a need for improved determination, to live by the standards that are established for everything from handling practices to temperature control. This takes constant vigilance and lots of determination from the top down and the bottom up, if we are going to use good practices."
While anything fresh is also ripe for contamination, Stangeland said he loses sleep over the delis in particular.
"The danger points are in the prepared food section in the store," he said. "There are thousands of them all over the industry. In a chain like the ones I am used to working in, 90% or more of the stores have them, and those numbers are bound to increase.
"The failure to follow food sanitation practices there and food-handling practices there will have ramifications."
Asked if the solution lies with new, stricter store-level practices based on the principles of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points, Stangeland replied, "I don't know yet. It is cumbersome to some extent and has to be more than a record-keeping exercise. But it is a starting point to develop the mental disciplines, the internal commitment, to doing what needs to be done."
Notwithstanding the calamity of the Foodmaker epidemic, Stangeland said the fast-food industry at large has the discipline, and exercises impressive control over food safety by simplifying its products and systems.
"But in delis, the products are very varied. You have salads with all kinds of ingredients, including meats and shellfish. We are working on prepared products from sandwiches all the way to entrees. The safe-handling challenge there is much more daunting than at a fast-food chicken or hamburger restaurant."
Most importantly, the challenge for supermarkets should not stop at the deli counter, or the checkout. Stangeland said it is imperative that the industry educate its customers to take up the baton for food safety.
"That includes proper refrigeration of perishables; timely use of them; proper handling so you don't induce contamination, and proper cooking. Those are only the obvious issues."
It is obvious to Stangeland that the industry ignores this duty at its peril. "If a product gets to the checkout having come through the entire channel in high-quality, safe, nutritious condition and is abused after it leaves the store, it can be lethal.
"There are some great misperceptions about what the consumers' responsibilities are. This is simply because of inadequate information, and it is the industry's responsibility, it seems to me, to provide better information."
Again, individual chains can make a dent in their markets, but Stangeland is calling for more. "There is no compelling, industrywide effort, coordinated with the government agencies that are involved, to get the full message across effectively.
"We have a long way to go to do that. I have not seen any real consumer research on it, but it seems to me somebody ought to do some. It would be interesting to do really broad-based research, to see what the perceptions and misperceptions and lack of perceptions are."
With a shared understanding of the information gap, retailers could move more effectively. "It has to move that way. If the industry can get itself in sync, then it has a good chance of being able to serve all our customers in a unified way, with industrywide information. But if we don't have our own thinking synchronized, we will have trouble doing that," said Stangeland.
"We are somewhere beyond the beginning of this, but we have a long ways to go yet, to maturity of the movement," he said.
