Blue Bell Workers Describe Unsanitary Conditions Before Listeria Outbreak
“If it had rained real hard and water sat on the roof, it would just trickle down,” says one former Blue Bell employee. (Photo: Blue Bell Ice Cream/Instagram)
Former employees of Texas-based ice cream maker Blue Bell Creameries are speaking out about the unsanitary conditions at their factory, which was linked to a deadly outbreak of listeria.
Blue Bell temporarily shut down production of all of its products in late April due to the contamination that left three people dead.
Workers now say that management ignored their complaints.
“It’s a fantastic product and they’ve done a lot for this community, but at the same time, there’s a bad side to Blue Bell where everything was overlooked,” Terry Schultz, who worked in the company’s Brenham, Texas, factory, told CBS News.
“A lot of times when I walked in, there was just ice cream all over the floor,” Schultz said. “Sometimes the machines would just go haywire, the product would just continually run through the conveyor belt and just drop right onto the floor.”
Stopping to clean the ice cream would slow down production, Schultz explained, so workers left it on the floor, where bacteria could grow and flourish. But Schultz said nothing was done about his complaints.
“The response I got at one point was, ‘Is that all you’re going to do is come here and b**** every afternoon?’” he said.
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Fellow former Blue Bell factory worker Gerald Bland told a similar story. He used to operate a fruit feeder that would go into the ice cream, and noticed that oil from the fruit feeder would leak right into barrels of ice cream.
“It’s all about the money,” he told CBS News.
Both described wet conditions in which listeria can thrive. “[Water] on the wall, by the 3-gallon machine. If it had rained real hard and water sat on the roof, it would just trickle down,” Bland said. “We had a couple of times where it actually flooded Area 2, to where they had to cut their machines off because there was too much water over there.”
Blue Bell publicist Jenny Van Dorf tells Yahoo Health that the “isolated views expressed by two former Blue Bell employees on CBS News do not reflect the experience of the vast majority of our employees, who know we take the cleanliness of our facilities and the quality of our products very seriously.”
Van Dorf added that an average of 200,000 people tour the Brenham plant each year and see the operation for themselves. “Our employees, many of whom have worked with us for 20 or 30 years or more, are hardworking, dedicated individuals who are committed to producing the best ice cream possible,” she said. “Our top priority and commitment is to produce high quality, safe, delicious ice cream for our customers.”
Blue Bell began producing ice cream again in late August to mixed reactions from fans. Yahoo Health’s calls to Blue Bell for comment have not been returned at this time.
In addition to the deaths caused by the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 10 people in four states were also hospitalized due to illness from the listeria bacteria believed to have been in Blue Bell products.
Listeriosis, an infection caused by consuming food contaminated with the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, is life-threatening and kills an estimated 260 people in the U.S. each year.
“In FDA testing, more than 99 percent of Blue Bell products had listeria in it,” Mike Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, tells Yahoo Health. “It was incredible. It wasn’t high levels, but it was there.”
Blue Bell has said its plants have gone through extensive cleaning and decontamination in order to resume production, but is it enough?
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Doyle says it should be. Here’s why: Blue Bell likely had to strip down all of its plant equipment, take it apart, and fully clean and sanitize everything. That includes getting rid of biofilms, mucus-like substances that can surround bacteria like listeria and protect it from sanitizers that would otherwise kill it.
Once that’s completed, the equipment will be tested and retested, and the ice cream will be frequently checked and swabbed to make sure it’s listeria-free.
“The FDA has jurisdiction over this, and they’re going to be monitoring the whole thing,” says Doyle. “The FDA is going to be all over these Blue Bell plants for a while.”
Blue Bell will also need to reevaluate and validate its protocol to make sure it’s testing at the right place and time before the ice cream goes out, food safety expert Darin Detwiler, senior policy coordinator at the nonprofit STOP Foodborne Illness and adjunct professor at Northeastern University, tells Yahoo Health.
Doyle adds that it’s actually not uncommon for listeria to get into processing facilities, since “some soil contains listeria and it can come in on plant workers’ shoes.” However, “the key is to control it,” he says.
But Detwiler says it’s in Blue Bell’s best interest to make sure its goods are safe, which likely means the company will rigorously test its products before putting them on shelves, now and in the future.
“The whole issue is people’s confidence,” he says. “Blue Bell is going to do anything and everything they can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Unfortunately, Doyle says there’s no way of visibly telling whether your ice cream is listeria-free — you have to trust the manufacturer.
While there is always a risk of contracting a foodborne illness from any product, Doyle says you shouldn’t stress out about eating Blue Bell ice cream once it’s back on the market.
Says Doyle: “If the FDA says it’s safe and ready to be consumed, I would feel comfortable eating it.”
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