Whole Foods' handling of chocolate bar shows how warnings fail

CHICAGO, Nov 22, 2008 (Chicago Tribune - McClatchy-Tribune News Service via COMTEX) -- WFMI | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Whole Foods Market has long trumpeted its premium chocolate bars for being made the old-fashioned way, in Switzerland. But two years ago it added another manufacturing claim to the product's labels - one that would appeal to millions of Americans who suffer from potentially life-threatening food allergies.

"Good manufacturing practices," the labels stated, were "used to segregate" potential allergens such as tree nuts, soy or milk.

The labels were informative, comforting and also untrue.

A Tribune investigation found that the chocolate bar was, in fact, manufactured in a way that posed a risk to people with allergies. In 2007, a year after the "good manufacturing" label was put on the bars, a child with food allergies had a reaction after eating the candy, which contained tree nuts. Two recalls followed and the label was changed earlier this year.

But identical wording remains on hundreds of other products in Whole Foods' brand lines such as 365 Everyday Value and Whole Kitchen, leaving consumers in the dark about whether these items pose an allergen risk.

The story of the Whole Foods chocolate bars is just one example of how consumers are at the mercy of a food chain with little accountability and labels that are not policed for accuracy.

Getting any single product on the shelves of any grocery store may involve a dozen firms and suppliers, each one not entirely certain of the other's health standards. Even companies such as Whole Foods that market themselves as a healthier choice may know little about the safety of their products.

One key threat: cross-contamination, which is when certain ingredients inadvertently end up in other products during the harvesting or manufacturing process.

By law, ingredient labels must disclose whether products contain major allergens, but they do not have to warn about allergens that might slip into food.

In recent years a soaring number of companies have voluntarily put cross-contamination warnings on their products.

But the Food and Drug Administration found that some firms were using these labels to protect themselves from lawsuits, not simply to help consumers. The FDA has urged companies to not rely solely on labels and instead try to prevent cross-contamination by taking steps such as cleaning assembly-line equipment.

Now the agency is studying whether tougher policies are needed to ensure warning labels are uniform and not misleading.

Such measures might have prevented what Whole Foods did with labels on its chocolate bars and dozens of other products.

Whole Foods' "good manufacturing" label is one of the few that puts a positive spin on the possibility of cross-contamination, according to Steve Taylor, a leading allergy expert and director of the allergen laboratory at the University of Nebraska.

"If you are going to do that," he said, "you had better have your act together 110 percent of the time."

Walk down any Whole Foods aisle and you're bound to see products with labels boasting of "good manufacturing" practices.

Though they are gone from Whole Foods chocolate bars, the Tribune found such labels on more than 300 products in one of the chain's west suburban stores, including snack mixes, chips and cookies - foods prone to the kind of cross-contamination that is a major cause of allergic reactions.

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Based on reading the label, for example, a consumer with a wheat allergy might consider buying Whole Foods' Blue Corn Tortillas because its label promises that "good manufacturing practices (were) used to segregate ingredients in a facility that also processes milk, wheat and soy ingredients."

But the reality is that segregating wheat from that product is difficult at best. Just ask Mike McCabe, a sales executive for Bueno Foods, the Albuquerque, N.M., firm that manufactures the tortillas for Whole Foods.

Wheat dust in the tortilla plant "is really impossible to segregate" from non-wheat products, McCabe said.

Bueno cleans equipment and uses separate assembly lines for different products, he said. But wheat dust is so tiny and prevalent at the plant, he added, that "I could be breathing in wheat dust right now, and I'm two buildings away, in an office."

Whole Foods acknowledged the tortilla labels are problematic. The chain's director of private brand development, Nona Evans, said that in January the company conducted routine testing on the tortillas and found trace amounts of gluten, which is a protein of wheat, rye or barley. The company decided to place warning stickers on the product until new packaging could be made, she said.

But the Tribune found that many tortillas currently for sale have neither warning stickers nor new packaging with the proper language - 10 months after Whole Foods said it discovered the problem.

Company officials could not explain why some tortillas aren't properly labeled.

Even so, Evans said Whole Foods' allergen-control practices are effective. "We sell millions of individual products each year, and the number of substantiated allergen related-incidents that we see are in the single digits," she said.

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Whole Foods defended its move in early 2006 to place the "good manufacturing" language on nearly all its branded products. The goal, Evans said, was to offer customers information about the manufacturing facilities.

"We tend to over-inform our consumers so they can have as much transparency into our products as possible," she said.

Whole Foods continues to use the "good manufacturing" statement on many other items, Evans added, "because they are products that are not necessarily so allergy sensitive."

But allergy experts say any amount of hidden allergens, in any kind of food, can cause a potentially deadly reaction.

When asked if Whole Foods is confident that its blanket "good manufacturing" claim was accurate for each of those products, Evans initially said: "With the quality assurance program that we have in place today, yes, we are very confident."

In a later interview, though, she acknowledged that Whole Foods has been conducting a review of its products that began within the last two years to see if label changes are in order - a process, she said, that will take another year.

"Our 365 Organic Everyday Value Swiss Milk Chocolate is made in Switzerland, using slow, traditional Old-World conching, or blending methods," the label reads in part. ". . . All of our cocoa beans are grown organically in the Dominican Republic by a co-op of small farmers."

This is another way of saying that, like most food store chains, Whole Foods uses a web of contractors to produce its private label offerings.

In the late 1990s, an Arizona company Spruce Foods began importing the candy from Switzerland and selling it to Whole Foods.

About the same time, representatives from both the importer and Whole Foods together toured the Swiss plant, run by Chocolat Bernrain, according to Norm Petersen, co-owner of Spruce Foods. He said they saw that products were made on the same production line without cleaning in between. That meant ingredients from one product could easily end up in another.

But no warnings to that effect were put on the labels.

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In the summer of 2002, a 2-year-old girl with a known milk allergy ate a piece of a Swiss Dark Chocolate bar. The toddler started coughing, said her throat hurt and broke out in hives.

After her mother gave her Benadryl, the girl recovered and the episode was reported to the FDA. Eight weeks later, that bar and eight variations under the Whole Foods Organic Swiss label were recalled for hidden milk and nuts.

Warnings were added. The problem went away, but not for long.

In early 2006, Whole Foods placed the new "good manufacturing" allergen statement on nearly all of its private-brand products. Within days, at least two consumer complaints were lodged with the FDA over the confusing nature of that warning language. One parent of a girl allergic to peanuts and tree nuts wrote: "How does one interpret this kind of information?"

Despite Whole Foods' claim, the Swiss factory still manufactured different products on the same line.

Then, last year, a child had an allergic reaction to a Swiss Milk Chocolate with Rice Crisps bar. Whole Foods tested the bars and found hidden hazelnuts, walnuts and pecans.

Whole Foods sent the test results to its importer, Spruce Foods, which contacted the Swiss manufacturer.

"And the manufacturer said, 'Why is anyone surprised?' " Petersen recalled. Nothing had changed. The Swiss still took few precautions to prevent allergens from slipping into its products, he said.

On Dec. 14, Whole Foods announced a recall of a limited number of just the Milk Chocolate with Rice Crisps bars. The grocery chain immediately tested other varieties of its Organic Swiss chocolate bars, finding similar problems. So a week later, Whole Foods again recalled eight varieties of the candy bars, 1.1 million in all.

"They watered down the disclosure, and it bit them in the backside," said Petersen. He blamed new personnel at Whole Foods for the decision. "They likely had never been over in that plant," he said. (Whole Foods officials could not say who from the chain visited the factory.)

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In January, a Whole Foods staffer inspected the Swiss factory and concluded the equipment was so difficult to clean that hidden allergens were unavoidable. So the chain earlier this year rewrote the allergen statement and put warning stickers on the bars.

The stickers state the candy "may contain" certain allergens. But even this raises questions about whether the warnings should be stronger. A spokesman for the Chocolat Bernrain factory, Jost Ruegg, said it is "almost impossible" to avoid cross-contamination in the facility. "There are 19 chocolate manufacturers in Switzerland," he said, "and all of them are confronted with this."

The Tribune sent a Whole Foods Organic Swiss Dark Chocolate bar to the Nebraska lab. The candy's label said the bar "may contain" tree nuts and milk, and test results showed that it did. (Tests on the Whole Foods tortillas for gluten, meanwhile, came back non-detect.)

Whole Foods said that when it became aware it had a problem with its chocolate-bar labels, the company removed similar language from all chocolate products.

But the Tribune found several Whole Foods chocolate products still being sold with the "good manufacturing" label, including solid chocolate chips, chocolate chunk pieces, hot chocolate mix, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate ice cream bars and chocolate torte.

Informed of the Tribune's findings, Evans said the labels on four of those six products were appropriate because the items were so carefully manufactured and tested that they were virtually immune to hidden allergens. But she acknowledged that the ice cream bars and cookies were not so carefully made and that those products would soon be getting new labels.

Evans emphasized that Whole Foods collects detailed allergen-related information, such as the likelihood of cross-contamination, on all of its manufacturers and suppliers. And, she added, Whole Foods and third-party auditors inspect factories for allergen problems.

Asked why such scrutiny did not catch fundamental problems at the Swiss candy factory, she said, "It's a continual education."

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