By JD Malone, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams is once again battling listeria, a problem that caused a huge disruption in the company’s business last year.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration found listeria, a human pathogen that can sicken and kill people with weakened immune systems, in the company’s Michigan Avenue production kitchen this past winter.
In a letter sent to Jeni’s CEO John Lowe earlier this month, the FDA said two out of 75 swabs taken in January and February at the kitchen came back positive for listeria. The two positive swabs were from the prep-room floor and a wash room floor, according to the FDA. No listeria was found in Jeni’s products.
The company tests every batch of ice cream before it is released to retailers.
“We instituted this test-and-hold procedure when we reopened a year ago and we have not had a single batch test positive for Listeria,” wrote founder Jeni Britton Bauer, quality director Mary Kamm and CEO John Lowe in a post on the company’s blog.
Jeni’s shut down twice last year for more than a month in total after listeria was found in a pint of Jeni’s ice cream in Nebraska and subsequently in Jeni’s kitchen. A second finding of listeria on the floor in the kitchen occurred last year as well. The problem cost the company at least $2.7 million and resulted in the recall of 535,000 pounds of ice cream.
The FDA’s findings are both good and bad news, according to Ahmed Yousef, a listeria and food safety expert at Ohio State University.
“Last year they found 20 positive samples, this year they collected 75 and found only two positive. Whatever they have been doing is working,” Yousef said.
The bad news, according to Yousef, is that the strain of listeria found this year matches the strain found last year in a pint of Jeni’s ice cream on the shelf of a Whole Foods in Nebraska and at the production kitchen.