How Would You Look In Orange?
Scenario 1
One Monday morning, a young mother and her toddler set out to do their weekly food shopping. At the grocery store, they gather their usual items – baby food, fruit and chicken, to name a few – and head to the check-out line. The mother swipes her loyalty card – never wanting to miss an opportunity for savings or the weekly specials mailer – and pays the bill.
The following day, the FDA issues an alert on the same baby food the mother purchased. The grocery store pulls the remaining baby food off of the shelves, preventing any additional tainted product from being sold. While their efforts are commendable, it simply isn’t enough.
Days later, the toddler is fed the tainted baby food by her unsuspecting mother, and becomes critically ill.
Ironically, that same day, the young mother receives a grocery store coupon by e-mail for the same brand of baby food she bought that week. The grocery store used their loyalty card database to market to her, yet did not use that same information to notify her of the infected baby food that would soon harm her child.
Scenario 2
On a Friday afternoon, a massive recall is issued for packets of tainted ketchup issued from a nationwide distributor. Restaurant companies across the country call their franchisees and store owners in a rush to get the packets out of the system. Because there are hundreds of stores, and the restaurant headquarters have to call using limited resources from already overwhelmed call centers, restaurant executives anticipate that the ketchup packets will be pulled from most of their store locations in a couple of days.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, a mom is driving a minivan full of kids fresh off the soccer field. She pulls up to their favorite quick serve restaurant and orders kids’ meals for the entire team. Thrown into each bag are a couple of ketchup packets that should have been recalled immediately. By Saturday evening, half of the soccer team is in the hospital in various states of critical care.
How Will You Be Judged?
If either of these scenarios happened to your company, how would your organization respond? In reality, these situations are being played out daily all across the food industry, and it is likely that you have firsthand knowledge of how harmful a recall can be to your customers and your brand’s reputation.
The food industry as a whole is being divided into two distinct groups: one that removes tainted product from customer reach within a few hours, and one that cannot remove product in less than a week. As the acceptable recall time frame shifts from several days to just hours, how long will the laggards be tolerated by consumers, government and shareholders?
According to extremely conservative CDC estimates, food-borne illnesses sicken some 76 million consumers each year. Of those, 325,000 people end up hospitalized. 5,000 of them will not return home.
With over 5,000 food poisoning deaths each year in the U.S. alone, and the average settlement in excess of $1,000,000 and rising, what is at stake for your company and you personally? The financial damage of a poorly executed product recall is an unrelenting, costly ripple-effect: withdrawing potentially infected product, lost revenue and sales, plummeting stock prices, liability for physical harm, court costs, and personal compensation, and re-establishing consumer trust in your brand. More importantly, the lives and well-being of your customers are at stake.
In addition to the moral responsibility of protecting your customers, you have the responsibility to protect your brand from long term damage associated with recalls. In this age of litigation and strict liability, no company, or CEO, is absolved from the responsibility of getting bad product off shelves in a timely manner.
When defending against lawsuits, what will your company’s response be when asked “Why did your food withdrawal take days when your competitor took only a few hours to remove the same product?” “Why did you issue a food withdrawal, but never verify completion?” “Why don’t you have complete records of when and how you contacted your stores and when they finally quarantined all product?”
Good News! It’s a Solved Problem!
Instant Recall™ is a turn-key, high-speed recall and verification solution that can be implemented in just hours. Complete with a world-class team available 24/7, Instant Recall helps clients quickly remove tainted product, thereby protecting their customers, their brand’s reputation, and their bottom line.
In June 2008, during a massive, nationwide food recall, our team of experts launched a recall for a national food service brand within 4 hours of their signing on to use our service. This effort included hundreds of thousands of calls to tens of thousands of locations. With one call, you can utilize that same service for your emergency communications. Don’t wait! Try our online demo, call an expert, and see why the largest brands in the world are putting our technology, team, and best practices to work to keep their customers safe.