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Sep 30, 2009 10:57 pm US/Central
Good Question: What Triggers A Recall?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ―
Think you're hearing a lot about recalls? You are. On average, there are nearly twenty products recalled every day in the United States. So who decides to pull a product off the shelves?
"The majority have been voluntary, not mandatory," said Amy Rotenberg, President of Minneapolis-based Rotenberg Associates, LLC. She works with clients to coordinate strategic communication during a crisis, and finds herself involved in many recall cases.
"There's a lot of things at stake when something goes wrong that requires pulling a product from the marketplace," Rotenberg said.
But when it comes to deciding to recall a product, Rotenberg said there isn't a clear line in the sand.
"It's always a judgment call," she explained.
The process can start in many different places. Sometimes a company detects a problem during their own internal quality control testing. Other times, consumer complaints trigger an investigation. Governmental regulators, like the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, also do random testing which can trigger a recall.
"If people are becoming ill from consuming a product, even if it's just one person, we've met the threshold for a recall," said Ben Miller, an investigator in the Dairy and Food Inspection Division of the Department of Agriculture.
Miller was involved in the investigation that tracked salmonella to peanut butter, leading to one of the most wide-ranging product recalls in the country in 2009.
"We were the first in the country to put that puzzle together," Miller said.
Generally, he said, companies are cooperative when the government makes a call telling them that they've uncovered a problem.
"When a company is faced with that kind of evidence, they usually work really closely with us to determine what scope of product needs to be recalled," Miller said.
Clearly, it's not good for business to be selling product that makes customers sick. However, a recall has the potential to cost a company millions of dollars, even if it's for a problem like a labeling error.
"Sometimes companies will feel a lot of pressure from a government agency who themselves is under pressure," Rotenberg said.
The federal government coordinates most recalls, and they generally fall under the supervision of three agencies. The Food and Drug Administration coordinates the most recalls, in 2008, pulling 5778 products from the market. That compares to 4670 in 2004, according to agency figures.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Agency issued 684 recalls in 2008, affecting a total of 10,450,423 million cars.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 563 recalls in fiscal year 2008, that compares to 402 recalls in 2005.
Bottom line: there were more than 7,000 recalls in 2008, a 20% increase from just five years ago.
"I think there's a lot more products in the world today than ever before. And with globalization the products are coming from everywhere," said Rotenberg.
Miller said that surveillance technology and testing has vastly improved over the years, leading to more intervention, earlier in the process.
Still, it's an inexact science, according to Susie Bell, a spokesperson for Supervalu in Minnetonka. "If people are getting sick, there are often recalls while they're trying to figure out the source," she said.
"I think there's a misperception that if a product has been taken out that it's inherently very, very dangerous or lethal," said Rotenberg. "That's almost never the case," she said.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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