Boar’s Head announced Friday that it would indefinitely shut down the troubled Virginia deli meat plant that it acknowledged had caused a deadly listeria outbreak, killing nine people and sickening dozens more in 18 states.
The company also said it had identified liverwurst processing as the source of contamination and would permanently discontinue the product.
“Given the seriousness of the outbreak, and the fact that it originated at Jarratt, we have made the difficult decision to indefinitely close this location,” the company said in a statement posted on its website Friday. The shutdown affects about 500 workers in Jarratt, Virginia, a small rural town whose economic livelihood largely depended on the plant’s business.
Federal inspectors had repeatedly found health and sanitation violations at the plant.
“In response to the inspection records and noncompliance reports at the Jarratt plant, we will not make excuses,” the company said in a statement.
Two years ago, inspectors conducted an extensive review and concluded that conditions at the plant — rife with mold, rust and holes in walls — posed an “imminent threat” to food safety. That finding could have resulted in a warning letter or even a suspension of production there, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not take strict measures and allowed the plant to stay open until this outbreak forced a suspension in production in late July.
New federal records released Friday reveal that inspectors who went into the plant after the outbreak found the company had inadequate controls to prevent the bacterial contamination from spreading and had no written plans for employees to safeguard against cross-contamination.
They tested for listeria in various places and found one positive result on equipment used to move ready-to-eat products. The findings were in an area that food safety experts consider critical to keep clean: the zone of the plant where food has passed through the cooking step and is on its way to delivery trucks.
In July, Boar’s Head started recalling its lunch meats, after health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to trace hospitalizations that now number 57, as well as nine deaths of people 70 and older, back to the meats produced at the site.
At first, the recall involved only liverwurst, a lunch meat made of ground-up pig livers, and other deli items on the same line. But then it expanded July 29 to all meats from the plant, and the company paused production there. The CDC said the listeria strain that health officials found in liverwurst bought at retail outlets in Maryland and New York also matched the bacteria found in sick patients who reported eating other types of deli meat.
This is the largest outbreak of listeria infections since an outbreak in 2011 linked to cantaloupe, which killed 33 people, according to the CDC.
Jonathan Williams, communications director for the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents about 500 workers at the plant, said the plant’s closing was “especially unfortunate” because he believed the outbreak was “not the fault of the workforce.”
The company, he said, was providing severance packages and relocation to the employees. Boar’s Head gave employees the option to continue to work at the other Virginia processing center that the company operates in Petersburg, about 40 minutes away, or to transfer to others, he said. The company runs facilities in Michigan, Indiana, New York and Arkansas.
The Jarratt shutdown has already started affecting local businesses, like the CornerStone Crossroads, which used to sell cheeseburgers to about 100 plant workers every day.
But inspectors had cited violations of health and safety regulations time and again. Boar’s Head, like other deli meat producers, does not follow the strictest listeria measures outlined in Agriculture Department rules in 2015, such as adding an extra “kill step” to either irradiate or smash the deli meat to kill bacteria. Another option is to use an additive like citric acid to inhibit bacterial growth.
Instead, the plant relied on testing for bacteria and sanitation alone to ensure the safety of its food. Given the records that have been made public in recent weeks, Neal Fortin, director of the Institute for Food Laws & Regulations at Michigan State University, said he was surprised that the USDA allowed the plant to operate with such a flawed safety plan.
“You see multiple failures here — failures in design, failures in implementation,” he said. “It’s just shocking.”
With the outbreak, various federal and local agencies have been investigating the sources of listeria contamination and the company’s methods to limit the spread of bacteria.
The new Agriculture Department records released by the company Friday offer the inspectors’ conclusions that the “product may have been prepared, packed or held under insanitary conditions, whereby product may have become contaminated with filth.”
Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, reviewed the records and said she was troubled to see excerpts from company policies deeming listeria a “low risk” and a hazard that is “not reasonably likely to occur” because of company sanitation practices.
“I just don’t understand that,” she said. “If you’re producing ready-to-eat products you should be concerned about listeria. Particularly in deli meats, it’s well established that there’s a risk there, and clearly there was an ongoing sanitation problem in the establishment.”
The testing at the 44-year-old plant in Jarratt began after Maryland health officials linked a case of illness to the company’s liverwurst through whole genome sequencing. Inspectors turned up a positive test for listeria in the section of the plant where food is processed after an initial round of cooking.
A jack used to lift and move racks of beechwood ham tested positive for listeria, the USDA notice said. The positive test demonstrated that the facility had “inadequate controls” to prevent spread of the bacteria, the records show.
In faulting the plant for lacking written policies on cross-contamination, inspectors highlighted that employees failed to change their disposable aprons, gloves and arm covers before handling different meats. A quality assurance manager of the plant told inspectors those were required measures but they were not written down, regulators wrote in the notice.
The inspection continued July 26, when the USDA observed condensation dripping on beechwood hams. The USDA official tagged more than 10,000 pounds of ham to keep it out of the marketplace.
The next day, the inspectors discovered water dripping from a ceiling that was being propelled by a fan onto racks of assorted hams. The inspector held those meats back from distribution as well.
By July 29, the company expanded its recall to all of the products at the facility, which included ham and beef products like hot dogs. Boar’s Head has said that some products expire in October, raising concerns that they could still be in consumers’ refrigerators.
While the company has emphasized its concerns over its liverwurst, the CDC has said that the strain of listeria cultured from dozens of patients also included some who ate other sliced deli meats.
In mild cases, a listeria infection may cause diarrhea and vomiting that resolves within a few days. But if the bacteria spreads beyond the intestines, the illness becomes much more severe and may cause flu-like symptoms, confusion, seizures and a fever.
The illness is most dangerous for pregnant women, adults older than 65 and people with weakened immune systems. Listeria can be hard to trace back to a certain food, as it can take up to 10 weeks to cause illness.
Among the people whose illnesses have been linked to the outbreak are a woman who was pregnant and hospitalized for seven days, a woman who had to pause her chemotherapy treatment to recover from the infection and an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who died weeks after eating Boar’s Head liverwurst.
The illness and deaths caused by the contaminated meat, which was shipped and sold across the United States, are now the subject of several lawsuits.
The company said it would appoint a new safety council of veteran food safety experts and hire a new chief food safety and quality assurance officer who will report directly to the company president.
“You have our promise that we will work tirelessly to regain your trust,” the company said in its statement.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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