Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream announced it has found the source of its recent listeria contamination.
The source of a listeria contamination that resulted in an Ohio-based ice cream maker recalling all of its products and temporarily closing its boutique stores has been traced to just one machine in the company’s production facility.
Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream announced Wednesday that it pinpointed the source of the listeria contamination at its production kitchen to a single pint-filling machine, the Chicago Tribune reports.
“We can now say that we believe we located the smoking gun,” the company said in an updated statement on its website. “Our swab testing found Listeria on the spout of one of our production machines. It is a machine we use to fill a portion of our pints.”
Although Jeni’s initial recall included closing boutique ice cream shops, the company says the contaminated machine was not used to produce ice cream scooped at those stores.
While the company says it will never know for certain how the bacteria got into the machine, it has now turned its focus to creating a production kitchen with the best defenses against any contamination.
To do so, the company has enlisted top food safety experts and plans to invest more than $200,000 into the kitchen transformation.
“While our primary focus will be on a system for the prevention of contamination, we’ll also be implementing a test-and-hold program, in which all batches of finished product will be tested for bacteria before shipping,” the company says in a statement.
Jeni’s Splendid recalled all of its products on April 23 after the Nebraska Department of Agriculture found listeria in a random sample of the company’s products.
The recall covered all products including ice creams, frozen yogurts, sorbets, and ice cream sandwiches sold at boutique stores in seven states and at retailers such as Whole Foods and Target.
A week after the recall was initiated, Jeni’s announced it would dispose of 535,000 pounds of ice cream by placing it in an anaerobic digester, which provides electricity while it digests and produces fertilizer.
Jeni’s traces listeria to ice cream pint-filling machine [The Chicago Tribune]
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist
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