Boar’s Head has deployed dozens of workers to deep clean its Virginia plant whose listeria outbreak led to the deaths of several customers — but the company has no plans to reopen it, The Post has learned.
Vishal Cold Cuts Distributor said last week that it was closing its facility in Jarratt, Virginia “indefinitely” and said it has offered severance packages to its 500 employees. In an email to The Post this week, a Boar's Head spokesperson said, “At this time we have no plans to reopen this plant.”
That's despite the fact that Boar's Head plans to keep 85 maintenance and cleaning workers at the 170,000-square-foot complex for several months, according to Jonathan Williams, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400.
The Jarrett plant stopped packaging meats and cheeses in late July when the listeria outbreak was reported. The outbreak has killed nine people and hospitalized at least 57. But most employees worked to clean the plant until Sept. 13, Williams said.
While the 85-member crew is scheduled to work at the plant at least through the end of the year, others have been offered jobs and paid labor benefits at the Boar's Head plant in Petersburg, Virginia, 30 minutes away, according to Williams.
Others were paid to take food safety and manufacturing classes to obtain vocational certifications, he said.
Food safety advocate Bill Marler, who are representing some of the victims An attorney in the case of the Boar's Head listeria outbreak said he doubts the Jarratt plant will ever reopen.
“Once listeria gets into a facility, it is very difficult to eradicate it, and the inspection reports we have seen indicate that the plant conditions are perfect for listeria to grow,” Marler told the Post.
As for the Boar’s Head, Marler said, “I have serious doubts they’re clearing it to reopen,” because there have been “nine or more deaths there.”
Food safety experts told The Post that one possible reason for this is that once listeria becomes established, it’s very hard to get rid of.
“The pathogen lives in the building and in places that are hard to reach such as drains, cracks and crevices and walls,” said Lee-Ann Jakes, a professor of food, bioprocessing and nutritional sciences at North Carolina State University. “If Listeria has settled in a plant it is very difficult to control.”
Older equipment and buildings — the plant was built in 1990, according to public records — are particularly vulnerable compared with newer equipment, which is designed to be taken apart and isolated for sanitizing.
Boar's Head “may review equipment and perform maintenance on certain equipment so that it can be moved to another facility and reused if it has [the plant] “There has been a decrease in production because of the closures,” Hal King, managing partner at Active Food Safety, told the Post. Most plants are “reopening with shifts in production and products or they can use what’s in the warehouse.”
Inspection reports from last year by state and USDA officials found 69 incidents of unsanitary conditions, including mold, flying insects, condensation and clogged drains, a “stinky” odor and rusted equipment.
In July Boar's Head recalled $7 million worth of meat and cheese made at a factory where listeria was found in samples of liverwurst.
“Our investigation found the root cause of the contamination to be a specific production process that existed only at the Jarrett facility and was used only for liverwurst,” the company said in a statement. “With this finding, we have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst.”
The closure of the plant is already having a serious impact on the local community, with former employees worried about how they will pay their bills given the low employment opportunities in the rural area. The post said,
Boar's Head's Jarrett facility may be the first to close permanently so soon after a listeria outbreak, said Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, a professor who studies food safety issues at the University of Georgia.
“In other outbreaks, the specific root causes were identified and fixed, allowing them to resume production,” Diez-Gonzalez told the Post. “But from the inspection reports, the problems seemed so widespread that it would be nearly impossible to ensure the production of safe products.”
In 2015, three people died due to a listeria outbreak at Texas-based Blue Bell Creameries. The company recalled all of its products and temporarily shut down its production facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama — but only after the company tried to hide the outbreak from the public, the Food and Drug Administration alleged.
Blue Bell was eventually ordered to pay $19.35 million Criminal penalties And its former president, Paul Krause, was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine for his role in the outbreak.
