Since this visit did not require an inspection of production
operations, we also wonder why it could not have been scheduled
during the highly publicized industry-wide strike. Are all of these
rather strange actions intended to be a reminder that it’s unsafe to
irritate Big Brother?
Returning to the actual fruit canning operations of last summer,
our operating results were even more economically disastrous than
we had anticipated. As best we can sum up, our total price tag of
excessive costs for this adventure was at least $2 million. To
TriVaIley, it meant closing our fiscal year a half million dollars in
the red as compared to what otherwise would have been a modest
profit on nearly $160 million in gross sales.
Here are some other experiences. Our industry’s canneries are
subject to overlapping inspections by the state and federal food and
drug agencies. In recent years, both have increased the frequency
and intensity of their examinations. It is no longer uncommon for
us to have inspection teams from both agencies in our plants at one
time, or in back-to-back intervals.
In apparent concert with their federal counterparts, the state
agency also discovered an interest in geotrichum last year, and
produced a record number of work stoppages for clean-ups of
industry canneries. Their diligence was further demonstrated
through issuance of an unprecedented number of nine industry
citations, all of which required judicial proceedings.
In Tri-Valley’s case, our plants were inspected by federal and
state agencies a total of 23 times. This compares to 16 inspections
in 1974, and 6 in the preceding year. It was Tri-Valley’s good
fortune that none of these led to either product condemnation or
citation.
These sanitation inspections frequently cover the better part of
two days’ time and in all instances require involved management to
submit written responses to the critiques. Because of the disposition
of inspectors to request information to which they are not legally
entitled and because of the necessity to confirm cited incidents,
they must be accompanied at all times by top production and
technical services management. This results in a critical dilution of
top management attention to the dynamic events associated with
perishable commodity processing.
In view of the increasing frequency of inspections and their time
demands on management, we are giving serious consideration to new
staff positions intended to deal exclusively with agency inspection teams.
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