Boar’s Head has called in dozens of workers to deep clean the Virginia plant whose listeria outbreak led to several customer deaths — but the company has no plans to reopen it, the Post has learned.
The meat giant announced last week that it was closing its Jarratt, Virginia, plant “indefinitely” and offered severance packages to its 500 employees. In an email to The Post this week, a Boar’s Head spokesperson said, “We have no current plans to reopen this plant.”
That’s despite the fact that Boar’s Head plans to keep about 85 maintenance and sanitation workers at the 170,000-square-foot plant for several more months, according to Jonathan Williams, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 union.
The Jarratt plant stopped packing meat and cheese in late July when the listeriosis outbreak, which killed nine people and hospitalized at least 57, was revealed. But most employees continued to work until Sept. 13 to clean the plant, Williams said.
While the skeleton crew of 85 is expected 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, Virginia, and have received travel allowances, Williams said.
Still others were paid to take food safety and manufacturing courses to earn professional certifications, he said.
Food safety lawyer Bill Marler, who represents some of the victims of the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak, said he was sceptical the Jarratt plant would reopen.
“Once you have listeria in a facility, it’s really difficult to eradicate it and the inspection reports we’ve seen have shown that the condition of the plant is a perfect place for listeria to grow,” Marler told the Post.
As for Boar’s Head, “I have serious doubts they’ll clean it up and reopen it,” given the “nine or more deaths,” Marler added.
One likely reason is that listeria is stubbornly difficult to eliminate once it becomes established, food safety experts told the Post.
“The pathogen lives in the building and in hard-to-reach areas like sewers, cracks and crevices, and walls,” says Lee-Ann Jaykus, professor of food science, biotransformation and nutrition at North Carolina State University. “Listeria is very difficult to control if it has colonized a plant.”
Older equipment and buildings — the plant was built in 1990, according to public records — are particularly vulnerable compared to newer equipment, which is built so it can be disassembled and disinfected.
Boar’s Head “may examine equipment and maintain certain equipment in order to move it to another facility and reuse it if they retain it [the plant] “The plants are closed,” Hal King, managing partner of Active Food Safety, told the Post. Most plants “are reopening with a change in production and products or they could use them for storage.”
Inspection reports conducted over the past year by state and USDA officials found 69 incidents of unsanitary conditions, including mold, flying insects, condensation and clogged drains, “stale” odors and rusty equipment.
In July, Boar’s Head recalled $7 million worth of meat and cheese made at the plant, where a sample of liverwurst tested positive for listeria.
“Our investigation has identified the root cause of the contamination: a specific production process that existed only at the Jarratt plant and was only used for liverwurst,” the company said in a statement. “Following this discovery, we have decided to permanently stop production of liverwurst.”
The aftermath of the plant’s closure is already having a devastating impact on the local community, with former workers worried about how they will pay their bills given the few job opportunities in the rural area, the Post reported.
Jarratt’s Boar’s Head plant could be the first to close permanently and immediately after a listeria outbreak, notes Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, a professor who studies food safety issues at the University of Georgia.
“In other cases, specific root causes were identified and corrected, allowing production to resume,” Diez-Gonzalez told the Post. “But based on inspection reports, the problems appeared so widespread that it would be nearly impossible to ensure safe product production.”
In 2015, a listeriosis outbreak at Blue Bell Dairies in Texas killed three people. The company recalled all of its products and temporarily closed its production facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama, but only after trying to conceal the outbreak from the public, the Food and Drug Administration said.
Blue Bell was ultimately ordered to pay $19.35 million in criminal penalties and its former chairman Paul Kruse was fined $100,000 for his role in the outbreak.
