Regardless of where you are and what you are doing, if the New Zealand Food Safety Authority invites you to undertake a voluntary recall, you do it.
This week there have been reports of a Southland dairy factory, Happy Valley Dairies, closing as a result of the recall.
The 16-month-old business was something of a hybrid in New Zealand’s mega dairy market. The milk from 200 cows was processed under the same roof as the combined milking shed and factory.
After E.coli bacteria was found and reported, the NZFSA wanted a product recall. The owners Jeanine and Fran Venekamp who were out of town left it to the NZFSA. (E.coli has been responsible for more deaths in the USA in the past two years than melamine in China.)
The Happy Valley Dairy passed its responsibility to the NZFSA, and in this post-melamine era, you had to assume, the NZFSA was not going to hold back. And it didn’t. No one was going to point the finger at the Authority, and what should and could have been a largely localised, regional story became a national one.
After fighting so hard to get their business approved and under way, it seems a pity that their approach to a recall was so casual. The price? Their business.
