This post and the recent recall bring up an important and developing issue in food safety. How did "the quaker oats guy shit in all of the products?" And why is Salmonella showing up in so many low-moisture foods lately?
(Please note that my area of research involves dry sanitation methods for Salmonella cross-contamination within raw flour on equipment surfaces, not oats. Since they are both low-moisture foods, I feel confident using some generalizations to provide a bigger picture.)
1. Some Salmonella strains have desiccation resistance.
For those unfamiliar with microbiology, desiccation resistance means that the bacteria can survive in dry environments. Most bacteria need a certain amount of water available to them to survive. Salmonella serovars like S. Typhimurium, S. enteritidis, and S. Mbandaka can thrive in dry environments. These serovars have been linked to food recalls in the US for the past decade. Additionally, the dried bacteria can resist heat and chemical treatments, making it very hard to kill. This ties into the next problem.
2. In dry production environments, you can't use water to clean or sanitize equipment.
It's important to keep dry food products dry during processing. If they get "too wet," yeasts, molds, and bacteria can grow, impacting the quality and safety of the product. This is the main reason why the industry can't use water or water-containing sanitation solutions on their equipment. To clean, the industry uses brushes, scrapers, and dry ice blasting to remove debris. To sanitize (kill bacteria), some techniques include non-aqueous sanitizers, UV radiation, and superheated steam. These methods can take a lot of time and labor to complete, especially on gigantic processing lines like Quaker.
3. Pressure from upper management to "produce as fast as possible" may have cut down on time for sanitation.
This is slight conjecture, but I went to a sanitation workshop last year and chatted with some sanitation professionals who work in dry environments. I asked them about this problem specifically: "How do you get everything done in lets say, six hours?" One of them laughed and said "It's more like four and a half!"
The pressure from upper management to continuously produce is on everyone in the facility, especially the staff working on the line. "Time is money," and any time not used to make products is lost money. Product safety, something lauded by producers, is always at odds with profit and sometimes isn't achieved. An interesting example is Hello Fresh, who earned an esteemed award for food safety in April 2022, but issued a recall for potential E. coli in their meal kits five months later.
So how did the products get shit in them?
We don't know yet, and we might never know. Keep an eye on updates from the FDA and CDC. You may be able to receive additional information from a FOIA request, but that can depend on a ton of factors like confidentiality and who created the document trail. Instead, let's look at the problem from a systems context.
Oats can be contaminated with Salmonella (among others, see this survey for other indicators) from multiple sources, whether it be from soil, wastewater runoff, or contact with actual shit from known Salmonella vectors like birds. If these products were contaminated with desiccation resistant serovars, the Salmonella could have survived the cooking process (if applicable to the product) and contaminated production equipment. With inadequate sanitation, the equipment could have contaminated newly produced products, leading to where we are now. Additionally, Salmonella could have entered the production line from a roof leak (birds like to hang out on roofs) or other structural issues in the facility. There are tons of possible scenarios here.
Government agencies and external validation sources are getting better at detecting Salmonella in foods due to advances in sensing techniques (PCR, ELISA, etc...). The industry, the government, and research institutions are aware of these issues and are trying to find solutions for dry cleaning and sanitizing to keep this from happening. It's a hot topic these days and everyone wants to solve it. We can generate all of these potential solutions, sure, but it's up to the companies to implement them properly since there are no federal guidelines for dry cleaning and sanitation (yet). Most companies do their best to clean and sanitize because nothing loses more money and customers than a recall.
TL;DR: Salmonella sucks. Profit over product safety sucks. Throw out any foods linked to the Quaker recall for your safety.
