Nestle Cookie Dough Scandal Highlights Nestle’s “Citizenship”

I normally avoid Nestle’s contaminated food scandals – except when they highlight the corporation’s utter lack of concern for anything but profits.

In this case, Nestle shipped raw cookie dough that was contaminated with E. coli (ABC News called the announcement the “smoking gun), yet the bit I found most interesting was Nestle’s refusal to volunteer information asked for by the FDA (via the Associated Press):

NEW YORK (AP) — Inspection reports from a Nestle USA cookie dough
factory released Friday show the company  refused several times to
provide Food and Drug Administration inspectors with complaint logs,
pest-control records and other information.

The records, which
date back to 2004, were made public after Nestle’s Toll House
refrigerated, prepackaged cookie dough was discovered to be the likely
culprit in an E. coli outbreak that has sickened 69 people in 29
states, according to the latest estimates from the federal Centers for
Disease Control. The CDC is investigating the outbreak along with the
FDA.

Nestle voluntarily recalled all Toll House refrigerated
cookie dough products made at the Danville, Va., factory late last week
after the FDA informed the company it suspected consumers may have been
exposed to E. coli bacteria after eating the dough raw.

According
to the reports released by the FDA, the company refused to allow FDA
investigators access to certain documents in at least 2004, 2005, 2006
and 2007.

FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek said the Glendale, Calif.-based unit of Switzerland-based Nestle SA had the right to do so.

“Companies
have the right to make conditions on what they will or will not permit
during an inspection,” she said. “Some companies have a policy that
they outline for the investigator at the beginning of an inspection.”

We’re shocked to hear that Nestle – the multinational who (if you believe them) rescues small animals from trees and walks the elderly across the street – was happier playing CYA instead of helping investigators find the cause of something that was making people very sick.

The next time Nestle suggests it’s a “good corporate neighbor,” consider hiding the family silver. Suing Fryeburg into oblivion, pumping Michigan dry until ordered to stop by a judge, and providing wildly exaggerated economic “benefit” analysis to Chaffee County are only a few examples of its citizenship.

This seems to be another.

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