My Personal Recall

This is a precautionary

measure only and there is no reason to be alarmed.

That's the way the letter I received a few weeks ago started out. I don't think that my reaction was all too unusual. When someone starts off by telling me not to be alarmed, I don't get alarmed. I'm cool, I'm collected, and quite rationally I bypass alarmed and kick straight into panic! Especially, when the "not to be alarmed" in question concerns a food product I may have just ingested.

Usually on my top 10 list of people I don't want turning to me and saying, "now don't be alarmed," my grocer ranks just above my mechanic, my dentist and the termite inspector but significantly below an IRS auditor and a proctologist. When the warning is an official recall notification, personalized "Dear David," it jumps right to the top of the "I am now alarmed" list.

The recall in question was on a sample of hot sauce sent to me by a fledgling manufacturer trying for some favorable publicity to help crack its way onto the grocery shelves. Here's a bit of free public relations advice: When seeking favorable publicity it's often best not to poison the reviewers?at least not with your own samples.

It seems that one of the four sample bottles had a "possibly" leaking seal and might be "slightly contaminated." Slightly contaminated is a concept much like slightly pregnant?both can cause nausea, diarrhea and a prolonged habitation of her majesty's porcelain throne. The reactor room at Three Mile Island was "slightly contaminated," but I wouldn't want to dab any of the water from its cooling tanks on my buffalo wings either.



Luckily, I remembered that I hadn't taken any of the bottles home, so somebody else at our office must have. Thus started my own personal recall. Now the way it works with us trade media types is that like any other true journalists we live on anything that we can get for free, actually coveting our neighbor's samples, especially the costly ones. [WARNING?subliminal messages for more free stuff may have been inadvertently planted in this copy; please do not ignore them.] Whatever the recipient of a package doesn't want generally gets left in the mailroom, where it is picked clean in 93 seconds?130 seconds if the product has no perceivable use. These four bottles were no exception.

The question was, who had taken the leaky variety of hot sauce, and was it already too late? I quickly began my investigation. The task was hampered by the fact that the bottles in question had moved through our mailroom sample distribution center at least two weeks before. I quickly turned to my distribution records, which were blank. Here's where I called in our crisis management team, recall specialists and investigators to track down the pathogen's probable path, i.e., I asked a couple of people to ask around the office.

Luckily, we rounded up the usual scavenging suspects and quickly located three of the four sauce bottles. Unfortunately, they turned out to be the three bottles that the manufacturer claimed were still perfectly good. The missing bottle contained the variety that was in question. After having exhausted all the staff that was in the office during the investigation, we moved to contact the staff that was either at home, in our corporate offices in Manhattan or out on business. I was beginning to feel seriously in need of personal product recall insurance.

One of the remaining staff members was reportedly home sick with stomach problems. Was this the first incidence of an outbreak? A frantic phone call revealed that the employee had not taken the missing bottle and luckily was just extremely ill due to her own devices. Splitting the list among the three of us, we were able to eliminate all but two people, both of whom were out of touch, one on a business trip and the other on vacation. We finally tracked down the business tripper after a series of messages, but she didn't admit to having the bottle.

That left the vacationer. Could we locate him in time? Did anybody know where he had gone? We decided that it was potentially important enough to try. Then I looked at the name?not my favorite person in the company! Well, he probably didn't take the bottle, or if he did it certainly wasn't on vacation with him. There was plenty of time to ask when he got back to work. Why waste all that company money in calling around the country just to track him down when it was only "possibly slightly contaminated?" The warning could wait; we didn't want to alarm him on vacation.



Even with this limited recall among a handful of people all working out of one location, it was not easy to find the one bottle that could have been hazardous. How is a retailer expected to cope with a recall that involves hundreds of cases of product distributed to multiple units across tens of thousands of potential customers? The manufacturer had little trouble reaching us, but the difficulty arose getting to that second wave of distribution, the shopper?or in our case, the office freeloader.

The problem is even more daunting when the item in question is a fresh food, whether commodity or value-added or even prepared. The item is often quickly consumed and gone. The damage is done over a much shorter time period and the ratio of bought-to-consumed is much greater. Record keeping/recall systems and educational programs, like those conducted by AMI, would be helpful if geared to a retailer level.

Of course, the moral of the story is that next time I get samples, in the interest of my fellow employees I would be more charitable to just hoard them.

Of course, that's just my opinion. If I really knew, you couldn't afford me.