Chips, dips could spark wide food recall

OTTAWA — Canadian consumers can likely expect an avalanche of food recalls after an ingredient used in thousands of processed foods was found to be contaminated with salmonella, government investigators said Friday.

The popular flavour enhancer hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) is added to a wide range of processed foods, including dips, salad dressings, chips, sauces, hotdogs, soups and frozen dinners. Already, 56 products in the United States and two in Canada — chips and veggie dips — have been recalled this week after salmonella was detected in the flavouring ingredient produced by a Nevada company.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency on Friday said the recall net will probably widen as it continues to work with the Canadian clients of Basic Food Flavors, Inc. and importers of processed foods containing the ingredient.

Confronting a complicated and long supply chain, the Food and Drug Administration in the United States said this could result in one of the largest food recalls in North America.

"It has the potential, but we don't know," spokeswoman Rita Chappelle said Friday.

In this case, Basic Food Flavors, based in Las Vegas, is one of a handful of companies that supplies hydrolyzed vegetable protein to foodmakers. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste, is often blended with other spices to make seasonings that are used in or on foods to give them a meaty or savory flavour.

A customer of the supplier first identified a problem last month, when it found salmonella in supplies shipped from Basic Food Flavors. The FDA then inspected the processing plant and identified salmonella in the company's processing equipment.

All HVP manufactured since last September is caught up in the recall — meaning millions of kilograms of a potentially contaminated additive were distributed in bulk to foodmakers over a five-month period.

To date, there have been no reported illnesses associated with the consumption of the recalled products, U.S. and Canadian authorities said.

Chappelle said the health risk is "very low" for a whole swath of products to which the ingredient is added — namely cooked processed foods — because they "have a step in food processing which would effectively kill the salmonella. However, the risk would be to ready-to-eat food," she said, citing potato chips, dips and salad dressing as examples.

"You would just pop open a bag of potato chips and eat them."

CFIA spokesman Guy Gravelle said Friday that since salmonella are destroyed when food is cooked to a safe internal temperature, the agency is working with the FDA to determine which products contain the potentially contaminated ingredient but do not include a step that would kill salmonella.

These are subject to recall, said Gravelle.

Food contaminated with salmonella may not look or smell spoiled, but consuming food contaminated with these bacteria may cause salmonellosis, a food-borne illness.

In young children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems, salmonellosis may cause serious and sometimes deadly infections. In otherwise healthy people, salmonellosis may cause short-term symptoms, such as high fever, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

This isn't the first recall to start out slow before ballooning over time — a symptom of an increasingly globalized food system where the global ingredients market is expected to exceed $34 billion U.S. this year.

Last year, when raw pistachios from California were found be to be contaminated with salmonella, the initial recall included 25 mixed nut snacks and chocolate treats sold under three different brands. By the time the trace-back in the supply chain was completed months later, about 70 products and 18 brands sold in Canada were ensnared in the recall.

In the case of contaminated peanut and peanut paste manufactured in Georgia, the recall in Canada started with one snack bar in January 2009. By November, about 45 snacks foods had been yanked from the market in Canada.

Michael Armstrong, a quality management specialist at Brock University's faculty of business, has studied the growing complexity of food recalls.

He says the HVP could prove even trickier than the nuts recalls because of how the ubiquitous ingredient moves through the supply chain.

"You've got ingredients coming from one company, they go into a base food made by a second company, which then gets packaged under several different brand names by a third company, which then gets distributed all across North America, which is exactly what happened with the nuts. This one will probably be worse than that. With luck, we will not have any illnesses because of the way it does get processed."