Stuffed into wallets or attached to keychains, millions of food shoppers in the United States regard customer loyalty cards as tools for saving money. But some federal health officials and food safety advocates also see the ubiquitous cards as tools for saving lives.
Investigating a recent outbreak of salmonella Montevideo, epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the first time successfully used data from shopper cards to precisely pinpoint the product that had sickened consumers. The ongoing outbreak, first identified in July 2009, has been linked to black and red pepper and to products containing the spices, including salami and sausage products. At least 252 people in 44 states have been sickened by the products, which were sold by more than four dozen grocery store chains nationwide.
“We tried to use shopper cards in the past during outbreak investigations, but this was particularly successful to determine a specific brand of a product that was suspected to cause illness,” said Laura Bettencourt, PhD, MPH, an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at CDC.
During the outbreak investigation, many of the food-borne illness victims recalled purchasing an Italian-style salami, “but they could not remember the brand or the exact product name,” Bettencourt said. Because some of the consumers mentioned shopping at Costco, health officials from CDC and the Washington State Department of Health worked with the company to search through its purchasing records for a common thread. The data revealed that all of the shoppers had purchased salami manufactured by Rhode Island-based Daniele International Inc.
Diana Arias, left, shops with her mother, Rose Castro, at a Queens, New York, Costco store in May 2009. Costco recently allowed CDC access to its customer data, helping health officials identify the cause of a nationwide food-borne illness outbreak.
Photo by Daniel Acker, courtesy Bloomberg/Getty Images
“That was our ‘a-ha’ moment,” Bettencourt said. “It was an exciting moment because we had an actual brand name, an actual product that all of them had purchased before they became ill. We had been working on this outbreak for several months without an exact product.”
In January and February, Daniele International Inc. recalled about 1.3 million pounds of ready-to-eat deli products, including some sold under Boar’s Head and Dietz and Watson labels. A month later, two spice companies issued recalls of imported pepper after the Rhode Island Department of Health found the outbreak strain of salmonella Montevideo in pepper samples intended for use in the salami. Later recalls followed, including spices sold as seasonings at Whole Foods and other retailers.
Contaminated red and black pepper was identified in the salmonella outbreak.
Photo by Mark Wragg, courtesy iStockphoto
Food safety advocates are hailing the collaboration with Costco as groundbreaking. For more than a year, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has been urging retailers to use the databases created through customer loyalty card programs to notify consumers who purchase recalled products. But according to the advocacy organization, most retail chains that collect such data do not use it to notify their customers about recalls.
“Retailers are sitting on a lot of valuable public health information and we are calling on them to use it to protect consumers,” Sarah Klein, JD, staff attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told The Nation’s Health.
Costco has been notifying its members about recalls for about a dozen years, said Craig Wilson, MS, assistant vice president of food safety and quality assurance for Costco in Issaquah, Wash. For Class 1 recalls — in which there is a reasonable probability that the product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death, according to FDA — the company immediately stops sales of the particular item around the globe and sends a phone message to every Costco member who has purchased the item. In fact, during the peanut recall of 2009, the Center for Science in the Public Interest lauded Costco for making more than 1.5 million automated phone calls and mailing at least that many letters to customers whose records showed they had bought possibly tainted products.
The phone calls are followed up with personal letters and e-mails sent out on behalf of the vendor, Wilson said, noting that the customer data is a way to “keep Costco members safe.”
In March, the call to use potentially lifesaving data from shopper cards grew stronger when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced legislation in Congress that would overhaul the way food recall notifications are made. Under the Consumer Recall Notification Act, retailers would be required to post notices on supermarket shelves and freezers where a recalled product was previously located.
Gillibrand’s bill would also require food distributors to notify recipients of recalled items within 24 hours after a recall is publicized. And stores that track customer purchases through customer loyalty or membership cards would be required to use the information to notify consumers when they have purchased a recalled product. Under the bill, stores would be subject to a $100 penalty per customer if they fail to notify customers of Class I recalls. According to CDC, about 76 million Americans are sickened by contaminated food each year, 325,000 are hospitalized with food-borne illness and 5,000 die from food-related disease.
“In America in 2010, it is unconscionable that we don’t have an effective way to communicate food-borne illness outbreaks to consumers and health departments,” Gillibrand said in a statement. “It’s spreading too many diseases and costing too many lives.”
Even if all retailers adopted a strict customer notification strategy, the number of U.S. cases of food-borne illness may not necessarily fall, because awareness is only the first step, said William K. Hallman, PhD, a professor and director of the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. For example, a study released by the institute last year showed that many Americans fail to take appropriate actions after finding out about recalls.
Notifying people about food recalls by using their personal shopping data makes sense, say some food safety advocates.
Photo courtesy iStockphoto
“Americans think food recalls are very, very important,” Hallman told The Nation’s Health. “More than 80 percent of Americans, when they hear about a food recall, tell other people about them. And then they do nothing. They typically don’t check their own homes for recalled products. Fewer than 60 percent of Americans in our survey say they have ever looked for a recalled food product in their lives. So they think they are important, but they think they are important for other people.”
Simply focusing on notifying the public about recalls is not enough, Hallman said. People need to be motivated to actually look for recalled products, and one way to motivate them is to improve the relevance of recalls by using customer loyalty data to create personalized information.
According to the Rutgers study, about 75 percent of those surveyed said they would like to receive personalized information about recalls on their receipts at the grocery store, and more than 60 percent said they would also like to receive such information through a letter or an e-mail.
Such notification is easy for retailers such as Costco, which requires consumers to purchase memberships to shop in their stores. But such data may not always be accurate at standard grocery stores and retailers, Hallman said, as some people provide false information. For that reason, much of the information that stores gather through loyalty card programs is often not usable, he said.
Even so, food safety advocates continue to see promise in using the card data to directly notify shoppers, versus relying on them to seek out recall information on their own.
“You want something that comes into the home, like a letter or e-mail or phone call,” said David Plunkett, JD, JM, food safety program attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “If you know the person has the food, let’s do everything we can to get in touch with them and keep them safe.”
For more information on U.S. food recalls, visit www.fda.gov. For more on the salmonella Montevideo recall, visit www.cdc.gov/salmonella/montevideo. Lists of products recalled because of contamination are also available on the Web sites.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
