Recall put spotlight on food inspection

It just kept getting bigger. What started out as a warning from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on Sept. 16 about a ground beef recall from XL Foods’ Lakeside packing facility ballooned over the next month into the largest meat recall in Canadian history.

By October, more than 2,000 beef products, including a wide range of steaks, roasts and prepared foods, were pulled from shelves across Canada and in the United States as far away as Puerto Rico.

As the recall expanded, so did reports of illnesses linked to the tainted beef. Health officials reported that eight people in Edmonton had fallen ill, in addition to others in Quebec, British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador.

No one died from E. coli 0157: H7, though some people were hospitalized ranging in age from five to 63.

The XL Foods beef recall had serious consequences on several fronts beyond the grocery store shelves.

Alberta’s beef industry, after dealing with mad cow disease a few years ago, faced renewed financial uncertainty as the U.S. temporarily shut its border to meat from the XL Foods plant and the CFIA suspended Lakeside’s operating licence, shutting down one of the biggest slaughter and packing operations in the country for two weeks.

In Brooks, 2,200 employees were temporarily laid off as Lakeside was shut down and company officials worked to clean the plant and improve procedures that allowed E. coli to enter the products.

It led to a shakeup in the meat industry as the Edmontonbased owners of XL Foods, the Nilsson Brothers, signed a deal with JBS, a Brazilian meat packing giant, to manage the Brooks facility with the option to buy it outright.

The recall once again put Canada’s food safety inspection system under the microscope as the CFIA came in for serious criticism for its oversight at the federally inspected facility and raised questions about why American officials flagged the E. coli problems first. Those issues will continue to reverberate in 2013.