Ill-Timed Recall Alerts Require Follow Up Messaging

By Mike Rozembajgier

When the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) decided to recall 8,500 pounds of E. coli tainted ground beef processed by Cargill Meat Solutions, the agency issued the order just after midnight on Friday, August 28, 2010.  This prompted food safety expert Bill Marler to wonder if FSIS was deliberately issuing recall notices when consumers are least likely to pay attention.  Further investigation revealed that, in fact, recall notices have been released at all hours of the day and all days of the week.

The latest recall involving Cargill focused on their ground turkey and was also announced on a Friday—July 29, 2011. On Fiday, August 12^th, FSIS announced additional recalls of beef possibly contaminated with E. coli, as well as imported diced bacon potentially contaminated with Listeria. These latest Friday recalls prompted Food Safety News to reexamine this question to determine whether FSIS had a pattern of releasing this troubling information when no one was looking.

It turns out, a year later, the recall notices are still spread out across all the days of the week evenly.  Only Sunday is an outlier, with far fewer notices than the other six days.

There were, however, some key differences over the past year.  Since FSIS has begun focusing more on allergens in meats—and not just pathogens—the number of Wednesday and Friday recalls has increased.  While this increase is apparent when examining the raw data, the difference is not statistically significant.  Nevertheless, the increasing number of Friday recalls is still troubling, since Americans are least likely to pay attention to the news media on the weekend. Pathogen-related announcements occur most often on Tuesdays, most likely due to FSIS’s testing schedule.  These announcements, in the middle of the week, are likely to reach consumers when they pay attention to the news.

The news media landscape is already crowded and segmented, leaving recall announcements struggling to gain the attention they deserve.  FSIS, the Food and Drug Administration, and manufacturers themselves need to leverage all availableof media options—including digital and social media—to ensure that recall notices reach the widest audience possible.

While the large number of Friday recall announcements may not be intentional, the concerns about effective messaging and reach need to be taken into consideration. Recalls should be announced as early as possible. Waiting days to release an announcement based on a news cycle is not a viable option, but FSIS needs to continue to follow up throughout the work week to ensure their messages are being heard by the population at-large.

With a stronger and more effective messaging strategy—which includes exploiting the news cycle and all forms of media available—the government agencies tasked with keeping Americans safe can better achieve their important missions.

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