CASE STUDIES IN FOOD PROTECTION
By Gene Grabowski
The Year of the
Recall Response
It was the day before Halloween, 2007. House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi and Consumers Union Senior Director of
Product Safety Planning Don Mays teamed up to deliver an
ominous—and, to some industry insiders, downright fright-
ening—message about the future of consumer product safety
efforts in the United States. At a Capitol Hill news confer-
ence in which they dubbed 2007 “The
head of the
Year of the Recall,” the Speaker
called for the embattled
Consumer Product
Safety Commission
(CPSC), Nancy
Nord, to step down.
Don Mays demanded stricter
measures to keep dangerous products off the shelves. And
those sentiments were echoed lawmaker after lawmaker
trooped to the lectern to chastise industry leaders and regula-
tory officials after a record-setting year in which 472 con-
sumer products had been recalled to date.
It seems as if the politicians have
a hot issue on their hands. And
recent data reported by legal services
information provider Thomson West
only reinforces the fact that it’s
going to get hotter in the coming
months. According to the study,
which was released in mid-December, 61 percent of Americans
are worried or very worried about
product safety; 55 percent are more
worried about product safety than
they were a year ago; and 73 percent
responded that they have owned a
recalled product.
Simply put, 2008 is shaping up to
be a very scary year—with increased
scrutiny of product safety and intensified efforts to keep hazardous
products off the shelves—not just at
the CPSC, but at the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA), the
U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA), the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), and any
other government agency that has
oversight authority. Perhaps most
important, recalls are attracting ever
more media attention on any manufacturer, retailer or wholesaler that
issues a recall.
Of the 73 percent of respondents
who reported they owned a recalled
product in the Thomson West survey, only those owning recalled
automobiles outranked those who
had purchased a recalled food product. And with words like E. coli,
melamine, and Salmonella still per-
