For those living without a food
allergy, you might not understand the joy of finding out that a food you used
to love is now free of that allergen and you can eat it again. I am gluten
intolerant and was so excited when this summer Cheerios started coming out as
gluten free. They discovered a new process to extract all wheat from their oats.
It took them over two years to fully clean their machines and be able to
produce gluten free Cheerios. Finally everyone could enjoy Cheerios, until
yesterday, when General Mills had to recall 1.8 million boxes of Cheerios that
were labeled gluten free but actually contained wheat. There had been an error
and wheat contaminated the oats, triggering serious allergy reactions for
several customers. Even though the new technology worked, there was human error
and as a result, several people got very sick. On the one hand, this new
technology is great because it allows people to be able to eat something they
may love, but on the other, there is no guarantee that something like this will
not happen again in the future. General Mills needs to utilize some sort of
technology that can quality check each batch of oats and confirm that it is in
fact gluten free. It’s not fair to customers to be using technology to separate
the oats from the flour but then to not double check that that process was
successfully completed.
The processing that goes into making literal billions of cheerios is really interesting. To make a change across the entire supply chain all the way through to manufacturing the cheerios I am sure took a lot of effort. I agree with you, however, in that further quality control measures are absolutely necessary for such a product. I really think that there are a lot of parallels between these recalls and some of the other food recalls that happen relatively frequently with goods that are not necessarily checked as closely as they should be. For these foodstuffs, the FDA has extremely limited scope (they can only test tiny batches at a time) so any small contamination can get through. That means that it is basically up to companies to self-check their products.
ReplyDeleteThe processing that goes into making literal billions of cheerios is really interesting. To make a change across the entire supply chain all the way through to manufacturing the cheerios I am sure took a lot of effort. I agree with you, however, in that further quality control measures are absolutely necessary for such a product. I really think that there are a lot of parallels between these recalls and some of the other food recalls that happen relatively frequently with goods that are not necessarily checked as closely as they should be. For these foodstuffs, the FDA has extremely limited scope (they can only test tiny batches at a time) so any small contamination can get through. That means that it is basically up to companies to self-check their products.
ReplyDelete