Jimmy Patton bought a bag of Sam’s Choice Backyard Gourmet Burgers from his local Wal-Mart in Springdale, Ark. About a week later, he cooked a burger and ate it. A few days after his meal, Patton says, he began suffering from abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea and body fatigue (Belson and Fahim, 2007).
Doctors diagnosed Patton with an infection of the E. coli bacteria strain O157:H7, one of the nation’s leading causes of foodborne illness. Each year, according to federal estimates, the various infectious strains of E. coli strike an estimated 265,000 Americans, sending 3,600 to a hospital, and thirty to the morgue. The bacteria infect humans through foods that are contaminated with the bacteria. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, September 2016)
Patton was among twenty-nine Americans in eight states who reported contracting E. coli from frozen burger patties between July and September 2007. Investigators traced all of the patties to one source: the Topps Meat Company of Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Founded in 1940, Topps posted $8.8 million in annual sales by 2007 and ranked among the largest producers of frozen meat patties in the United States. It employed around ninety workers in its 3,000-square-foot facility.
In early September 2007, the US Department of Agriculture tested Topps products and confirmed the presence of E. coli in some samples. But Topps waited eighteen days before recalling 331,582 pounds of frozen hamburger patties, and did so only at the insistence of the USDA. Four days later, the USDA expanded that recall to 21.7 million pounds of beef.
On Oct. 4, Patton and other victims of the E. coli outbreak filed a class-action lawsuit. That same day, the USDA announced plans to shut down the entire plant. Why? Inspectors had discovered “inadequate process controls” in the company’s production lines that extended beyond just ground meat.
On Oct. 5, Topps shut its doors and fired all but ten workers. Here’s what the company’s CEO had to say: "In one week we have gone from the largest US manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome the economic reality of a recall this large."
Stop and think about the essential facts of this case:
- Investigators held Topps accountable for twenty-nine cases of infection out of an annual US average of 305,000 E. coli infections. That’s less than a third of one percent of the average annual total.
- No deaths were attributed to the Topps outbreak.
- Yet the USDA forced Topps to recall 21.7 million pounds of beef.
As a result, the company went from a thriving production operation to a dead corporate shell in just four months.
This is what an outbreak of a foodborne illness, along with the public’s reaction to the outbreak and the resulting product recall, can do to any company in the US food industry.
This is a major issue for the food industry, for your company and your career. No company is immune. Scientists have identified more than 250 foodborne diseases, most of which are infections caused by bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Toxins and chemicals cause the rest. Each year, according to federal estimates (CDC, December 2017), foodborne agents both known and unknown result in:
- 48 million illnesses in the United States.
- 128,000 hospital admissions.
- 3,000 deaths.
Moreover, it’s clear that Americans are concerned about the safety of the food products they buy. A scientific survey asked Americans, on which of the following would you spend the most federal dollars (Stinson, 2006):
- Preventing terrorists from flying jetliners into skyscrapers?
- Stopping terrorists from releasing poison gas in city subways?
- Thwarting terrorists from contaminating the nation’s food supply?
Most of the respondents chose number three: Protect the food supply. Now you may be surprised by that answer. A lot of folks involved in homeland security were amazed. They shouldn’t be. Not every American travels in airplanes or by subway. But everybody eats.
Americans love to eat. They expect their food to taste good. They also expect their food to arrive on their tables or in their kitchens free of disease or contamination. That’s why taxpayers pay billions annually for the USDA to set standards and conduct inspections. That’s why they spend billions more to empower the Food and Drug Administration as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s why cities and states create health departments to license and regulate their local food markets, manufactures, and restaurants. Americans want to serve their families with food that is clean and safe. When they suspect or discover that their food is contaminated, they get anxious, then they get angry, and then they punish anyone they believe responsible for the contamination.
In short: Americans become outraged. In the United States, public outrage rarely manifests as riots, boycotts, or demonstrations. When it comes to foodborne illness, public outrage most often expresses itself as consumer choices, news coverage, class-action lawsuits, overt political pressure, and aggressive government action. Through these means, public outrage may cause serious damage to even the largest companies that manufacture, distribute, or sell food products.
Responsibilities of the company executive
If you are a corporate executive in the food industry, you have a duty to acquire a fundamental understanding of what causes the public to get anxious and angry about outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. You should also learn how to calm that outrage before it destroys your company. You can’t leave it to the lawyers, who tend to become so focused on liability and litigation they forget that you can win the legal battle and still lose the war. You can’t leave it to your public relations team; few PR professionals understand the strategies and the tactics required to navigate public outrage during a risk controversy. Thus, as a corporate executive, the responsibility is yours to understand why the public gets angry about foodborne illness and how you can mitigate that anger. It is also up to you to understand that you have as much or more to lose in the court of public opinion as you have in any court of law.
There is more to running a successful company than a legal license. Every corporation in the United States also operates with a social license to do business. If the public turns against you, you lose that license, and soon you lose your business. Your legal license may still be intact, but good luck making a profit. You may consider it a paradox, but it is true: The more you help the public to make the right decisions about an outbreak of foodborne illness, the more you help your company. If you want to emerge from a foodborne crisis with your social license intact, you must understand the dynamics of the public’s reaction to foodborne outbreaks. And you must be ready to make the right moves and avoid the wrong ones. This is where risk communication comes into play. Risk communication can arm you with sound strategic thinking that will guide your responses to the public’s anxiety and anger over an outbreak of foodborne illness. This handbook focuses on one of the most useful and powerful tools in the risk communication arsenal: the message map.
Benefits of the message map
In any risk controversy, our primary communication challenge as an organization is to design messages that stakeholders can understand and accept when they are under high stress. The solution, Covello says, is to develop “a limited number of key messages that are brief, credible, and clearly understood (Covello, Minamyer and Clayton, 2007).“
The tools that help us do this are message maps, which risk communicators like Covello have developed based upon their research into how people process information when under significant stress (NCFPD, 2007). The message map is the organization’s best available tool for managing our risk messages to stakeholders during a high-stress event.
A message map organizes the key messages we most need to communicate – quickly, efficiently, and clearly – to stakeholders who are affected by a controversy or an emergency. “It is the template for displaying detailed, hierarchically organized responses to anticipated questions or concerns,” risk communicators Regina E. Lundgren and Andrea H. McMakin say in the fourth edition of their book, Risk Communication: A Handbook for Communicating Environmental, Safety, and Health Risks (2013) “Message maps are one way to make sure everyone understands the organization’s messages for high-concern or controversial issues.”
Once we complete our message maps, we can use them again and again to create a wide range of communications tools, including fact sheets, news releases, advertisements, talking points, scripts, speeches, web sites, and public service announcements. We can also use them as a guide when speaking to the news media or at public events.
The process of developing message maps can also help us to meet several goals before, during, and after a risk controversy. (Covello, Minamyer and Clayton, 2007). These goals include:
- Identify stakeholders, both current and potential, with whom we will need to communicate messages.
- Anticipate their questions and concerns.
- Organize our thoughts and prepare messages that address those questions and concerns.
- Develop key messages and supporting messages.
- Place these messages into a framework that is clear, concise, accurate, transparent, and accessible.
- Encourage an open dialogue about these messages inside and outside the organization.
- Deliver a user-friendly guide to the messages for anyone who represents the organization to stakeholders or the news media.
- Make certain the organization’s messages are accurate, consistent, and effective.
- Assure that the organization speaks with one voice. (For a dissenting view on this final point, read Peter Sandman’s 2006 column “Speak with One Voice”: Why I Disagree,” which is available on his web site, psandman.com.)
The language of this handbook
Before we get started, let’s establish some key definitions:
- A risk is the sum of hazard and outrage.
- Hazard is the estimated threat that a risk poses to life, health, and property as determined by subject-matter experts.
- Outrage is a community’s response to the risk; it is all the things that laypeople worry about that the experts consider irrelevant.
- A stakeholder is anyone who cares about a particular risk issue.
- An outraged stakeholder is anyone who is angry, upset, or fearful about a risk.
- A community is a group of stakeholders who share common values or interests.
- An organization is any corporation, company, partnership, institute, collaboration, or agency in the public or private sectors.
- A risk controversy is any high-stress situation that brings hazard and outrage into a public conflict between an organization and a community of outraged stakeholders. This includes an outbreak of foodborne illness.
- A message map is a tool designed to help an organization communicate effectively with its stakeholders during a risk controversy.
