ConAgra Foods is paying $11.2 million to put a criminal case behind it — one that dates back to a salmonella outbreak in their Peter Pan peanut butter plant in Georgia that made hundreds of people sick across nearly every state in the country.
The outbreak happened in 2006 and 2007. What made it worse, according to federal prosecutors, was that the company knew about contamination at the Sylvester, Georgia facility and kept shipping anyway. More than 700 illnesses were eventually linked to the plant.
ConAgra pleaded guilty to introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce. Probation and new food safety requirements came with the deal.
For food businesses in Hawaii — restaurants, retailers, distributors — this case is worth paying attention to. The islands are uniquely dependent on imported food products, and when something goes wrong on the mainland supply chain, there's no quick fix. A contaminated product that reaches Hawaii is harder to pull back than one that's still sitting in a warehouse three hours from the source.
The outbreak itself prompted changes to how the FDA approaches food safety oversight, eventually feeding into the Food Safety Modernization Act, which gave regulators more authority to inspect facilities and issue mandatory recalls. Before that law passed, the FDA could only request recalls voluntarily.
If you bought Peter Pan or Great Value peanut butter around that period, the recall applied to products with codes starting with 2111 on the lid. Most of those products are long gone from shelves, but the legal proceedings took years to resolve.