Beleaguered Blue Bell plans ice cream testing in Alabama facility
Blue Bell is one step closer to the green light.
The Texas-based ice cream company announced Thursday that it would likely begin test production of its products at its Sylacauga, Alabama facility “in the next several weeks.”
In April, Blue Bell promised a complete overhaul of its sanitation practices after issuing a nationwide recall of every single flavor of ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sherbet it makes due to a listeria contamination that was linked to three deaths in Kansas.
Though there is no firm date for when its familiar round cartons will return to the shelves, “the little creamery” calls the testing a big step toward recovery.
“We have been working diligently to prepare our facilities to resume test production, and our focus throughout this process has been to ensure the public that when our products return to market, they are safe,” Greg Bridges, vice president of operations for Blue Bell, said in a press release. “We are very excited about taking these important first steps as part of the process of getting high-quality Blue Bell products back to consumers.”
The scale of the corporate crisis that faced Blue Bell has been compared to the 1982 Tylenol scare, when Johnson & Johnson immediately recalled 31 million bottles of its top-selling pain reliever once it was determined that pills deliberately laced with cyanide had caused the death of seven people in the Chicago area.
When Tylenol returned to stores, it was in tamper-proof packaging.
Blue Bell said that part of its new quality control measures include daily testing of product samples by “a leading microbiology laboratory.”
“I suspect their (Blue Bell’s) reasoning is that if we can show people we can be good stewards of their health, maybe they will trust us to get these things cleaned up and not have these problems in the future,” Dr. Jonlee Andrews, an Indiana University business professor specializing in brand management, told CNHI in April.
“If you think about the Johnson and Johnson case in the 1980s, it was just six or eight bottles in one store,” she said. “They took the high road and they bounced back pretty well.”