Boar’s Head workers scrubbing plant infected by listeria, with no plans to reopen it
Boar’s Head has tapped dozens of workers for a deep clean of the Virginia plant whose listeria outbreak has led to multiple customer deaths — but the company has no plans to reopen it, The Post has learned.
The giant cold cuts distributor said last week it is closing the Jarratt, Va. facility “indefinitely” and said it has offered its 500 employees severance packages. In an email to The Post this week, a Boar’s Head spokesperson said, “We do not currently have any plans to reopen this plant.”
That’s despite the fact that Boar’s Head plans to retain some 85 maintenance and sanitation workers at the 170,000-square-foot facility for several more months, according to Jonathan Williams, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400.
The Jarratt plant stopped packaging meats and cheeses in late July when the listeria outbreak – which has killed 9 people and hospitalized at least 57 – came to light. But most employees continued to work there through Sept. 13 to clean the facility, Williams said.
While the skeleton crew of 85 is slated to work at the plant at least through the end of the year, others have been offered jobs at a Boar’s Head plant 30 minutes away in Petersburg, Va. and given commuter stipends, according to Williams.
Still others were paid to take food safety and manufacturing classes to earn professional certifications, he said.
Food safety attorney Bill Marler, who is representing some of the victims in the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak, said he’s skeptical the Jarratt plant will ever reopen.
“Once you have listeria in a facility it’s really hard to eradicate and the inspection reports we’ve seen showed the condition of the plant as a perfect place for listeria to grow,” Marler told The Post.
As for Boar’s Head, “I have serious doubts that they are cleaning it to reopen it,” given the “9 or more deaths,” Marler added.
One likely reason is that listeria is stubbornly hard to get rid of once it is established, food safety experts told The Post.
“The pathogen lives in the building and in areas that are difficult to access like drains, cracks and crevices and walls,” said Lee-Ann Jaykus, a professor of food, bioprocessing, and nutrition sciences at North Carolina State University. “Listeria is very difficult to control if it has colonized in a plant.”
Older equipment and buildings – the plant was built in 1990, according to public records – is particularly vulnerable versus newer equipment, which is built so that it can be disassembled and taken apart to be sanitized.
Boar’s Head “may be reviewing equipment and maintaining certain equipment in order to move it to another facility and use it again if they keep [the plant] closed,” Hal King, managing partner of Active Food Safety, told The Post. Most plants “reopen with a change in production and products or they could use it for warehousing.”
Inspection reports over the past year by state and USDA officials found 69 incidents of insanitary conditions, including mold, flying insects, condensation and clogged drains, “rancid” odors and rusty equipment.
In July, Boar’s Head recalled 7 million worth of meat and cheeses that were made at the facility, where a liverwurst sample tested positive for listeria.
“Our investigation has identified the root cause of the contamination as a specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was used only for liverwurst,” the company said in a statement. “With this discovery, we have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst.”
The fallout from the plant’s closure is already having a dire impact on the local community, with former workers worried how they will pay their bills given the slim employment opportunities in the rural region, as The Post reported.
Boar’s Head’s Jarratt facility may be the first to shut down permanently and immediately after a listeria outbreak, notes Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, a professor studying food safety issues at the University of Georgia.
“In other outbreaks, the specific root causes were identified and fixed which allowed them to re-start production,” Diez-Gonzalez told The Post. “But from the inspection reports, the problems seemed to be so widespread that it would be almost impossible to ensure production of safe products.”
In 2015, a listeria outbreak from Texas-based Blue Bell creameries killed three people. The company recalled all of it products and temporarily closed its production facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama – but only after the company tried to conceal the outbreak from the public, the Food and Drug Administration alleged.
Blue Bell was eventually ordered to pay $19.35 million in criminal penalties and its former president Paul Kruse was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine for his role in the outbreak.
