Case Study – Recovering from a Food Safety Crisis

After years as the specialty crop sector’s food safety standard bearer, a leading prepared and packaged produce supplier found itself implicated as the potential source in a series of foodborne illness outbreaks, including a high-profile case involving a global quick service restaurant chain.  

Our role

Our team was retained to develop a multi-stakeholder strategy aimed at correcting misinformation that proliferated and threatened to destroy the client’s long-earned food safety reputation. We worked with the company and its outside legal counsel to reassert the company’s commitment to food safety and its track record of advancing best practices from planting, to cultivation and processing, to packaging and transport.   

Our Impact

At a time when the public conversation was shifting toward healthier eating, reassuring US consumers that the processed and prepackaged fruits and vegetables they serve and eat were safe, healthy, and nutritious was imperative. Our client worked with policymakers, regulators, and industry peers to promote more effective regulatory inspection and review processes. If implemented, these processes would make food outbreak inspections more efficient and effective and ultimately reduce the threat of foodborne illness generated within the fresh produce sector. At the same time, we positioned our client’s executives as thought leaders in US food safety through strategically directed media interviews, company-generated social media content, and presentations at appropriate industry conferences and events.