Disclosing the O121 outbreak and auditing every store (2018)

An unidentifiable cause, and the weight of disclosure

The position headquarters found itself in did not allow it to choose the order of identifying the cause first and explaining afterwards. At the point where local authority investigations confirmed the same genetic type of bacteria in patients at several stores, the company wrote that it was highly likely the cause lay in ingredients supplied by headquarters, and published countermeasures while the source of infection itself remained unidentified. For headquarters to name stores run by franchisees and acknowledge its own involvement as supplier is, under a franchise structure, a decision of the heavier kind.

What was left behind were visible changes: additional testing items, new audit mechanisms. These amount to closing off suspected routes in the absence of a known source, and they are no substitute for finding the cause. Even so, for a chain that had made fresh vegetables its signature and spent twenty years building relationships with growing regions, the fact that uncooked ingredients had fallen under suspicion appears to have forced a re-examination of both procurement and in-store work. Safety cannot be proved by an accumulated record; it can only be re-verified each time. That plain conclusion is what this episode demonstrated.