Crisis Reflection 1

Crisis Reflection 1: The Taco Bell E. coli outbreak — calming public fears during food-borne illness scares

January 10, 2007 Copyright © 2007 PRSA. All rights reserved.

By Chris Cobb

Instructions: о Write a short 2-3-page essay reflecting on the article. You will want to

reflect on the issue at hand using facets of crisis communication you have learned in the course,

о You will be graded on content and how well you understand the course material, reasoning and how well you amalgamate the material,

о Proper grammar and mechanics is crucial and will be a part of your grade, о You will submit your paper to the Turnitin.com dropbox link within

blackboard.

You know you’re in trouble when you become the punch line for late- night comedians.

“You folks been to Taco Bell lately?” chuckled David Letterman in early December. “They have a wonderful new menu item, it’s the ‘Taco Apocalypto.’

“But you know,” he added with a twist of the knife, “Taco Bell’s slogan for a long, long time was ‘Think outside the bun.’ They have changed the slogan now, [it’s]: ‘Look outside for the ambulance.’”

Jay Leno had a variation on the same theme: “Taco Bell has had to close several restaurants because an outbreak of E. coli has made customers sick. As a result, Taco Bell is changing their slogan from ‘Think outside the bun’ to ‘Puke outside the store.’”

Comedy aside, the E. coli outbreak at Taco Bell outlets in the Northeast United States sickened 71 people and came on the heels of last fall’s spinach scare in which 204 people throughout the United States and Canada became sick and three — two elderly women in Wisconsin and Nebraska and a 2-year-old from Idaho — died.

The Taco Bell outbreak, which the company originally and incorrectly blamed on green onions, was caused by lettuce grown on farms in central California. The outbreak began during the last week of November and was officially deemed over by the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Dec. 14.

For the fast-food outlet, it was more than two weeks of frenetic damage control during which the company followed a fairly conventional strategy. The company put President Greg Creed front and center and launched a simultaneous print and TV campaign to reassure customers that it was doing all it could to correct the situation.

In the early days of the crisis, however, the company seemed uncertain about how to react. It had closed, cleaned and reopened several restaurants before it knew the source of the E.coli contamination. It had also removed green onions from all 5,800 of its restaurants without knowing for certain whether the suspected produce was the cause.

“Our approach to this entire situation has been to respond as quickly as we can and provide information to our customers and media as quickly as it became available,” Taco Bell’s PR director Rob Poetsch tells Tactics.

“When we first learned of the possible E.coli incident in one of our restaurants [on Nov. 30 in Middlesex County, N.J.] we immediately and voluntarily closed that restaurant and began working closely with local health authorities. That strategy of responding quickly and being open and transparent was our priority.”

On Dec. 4, shortly after the Middlesex County closure, Taco Bell voluntarily closed, sanitized and restocked restaurants in New York.

“The health and safety of customers is our top priority,” Poetsch explains.

Poetsch defends his company’s decision to identify green onions as the likely E.coli source and change produce suppliers before conclusive evidence was available. The company had based those decisions on its own preliminary testing.

“We didn’t want to risk anyone else becoming ill,” he says. “Imagine if we had that information and waited four or five days and the test results confirmed it and we hadn’t taken action? All the action we took was clearly customer-centric and focused on food safety. That was the driving force behind all our decisions and communications.”

Poetsch says being on the front lines in a situation where public relations and communications are key to corporate survival has been a learning experience.

“We have been guided by a number of principles,” he says. “When you get information, disclose it as quickly as possible to customers to build trust and be honest and open about the situation from the get-go. Take action and be responsible - work with the authorities to find a solution to make sure it doesn’t happen again to anyone.”

Food safety issues

Few, if any, PR professionals have more experience in food crisis situations than Gene Grabowski, vice president of Washington, D.C.-based Levick Strategic Communications and formerly vice president of communications and marketing for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the world’s largest association of the food, beverage, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry.

During last fall’s bagged spinach E.coli outbreak, he spearheaded the PR strategy for the United Fresh Produce Association and River Ranch Fresh Foods.

“There are so many food safety issues now that it is safe to say that this is one big running story,” says Grabowski. “We can measure and detect all kinds of food safety issues that we couldn’t 30 years ago, and with the greater ability to measure, the more things we’re going to find.”

Despite Grabowski’s assertion that the apparent increase in food-borne illness is the result of better detection, he concedes that because of North America’s dependence on fewer food sources — there are roughly 60 farms producing two-thirds of the food supply — the impact of a food-related crisis is far greater than in the past.

“If there is an outbreak that emanates from one of those farms, you’re going to affect more people,” he says. “One farm can infect a whole nation, but I do think that the food critics, and food police, make a bit too much of the risk. Food is safer now than it’s ever been.”

A former White House journalist, Grabowski says around-the-clock communications from hundreds of potential sources has made crisis communications increasingly challenging.

“The messages I’m giving to you require an open mind and a sense of understanding,” he says. “Consumers who are frightened that their families may be at risk are not open- minded. They want quick solutions. The second problem is journalism: There is a premium on news that is alarming, entertaining and exciting and not a premium on stories that are reflective and put things in perspective. The true weighing of facts is drowned out by stories that emphasize risk.”

PR professionals involved in handling communications about the two E. coli outbreaks have done as well as can be expected, says Grabowski.

“For the first few weeks of any crisis, there is a reaction ranging from mass hysteria to widespread alarm,” he explains. “All the mothers and dads ... know is that two or three people have died, hundreds have been taken sick and, if you read the news stories, they could be next.”

He says, “That’s 365 billion meals a year. There are about 400,000 food-borne illnesses a year, which means that the chance of you being stricken by food-borne illness is pretty slim. It’s hard to get that message out.” Key to calming public fears, says Grabowski is getting specialists, scientists and other experts to deliver the message to the public. Then, he says, PR pros have to seize the “teachable moment.”

“In the early stages, when all the alarm is happening, it’s very difficult to get a message out about reasons,” he says. “But when fears have been allayed, and people begin understanding better, then you have a teachable moment, but you have to seize that moment quickly because the door opens and shuts very quickly.”

In 1982, before mass use of the Internet, e-mail, blogs, video-sharing platforms and the myriad of other rapid-fire communications methods took hold, Peter Morrissey was part of the Johnson & Johnson PR team that handled the now seminal case of the Tylenol tampering crisis.

In what has now become standard PR practice, J&J’s main spokesman during the crisis was Jim Burke, chairman and CEO, who held a series of nationwide satellite video news conferences. This was considered a leading-edge method at the time of helping to soothe public fears.

There are similarities in the Taco Bell-Tylenol cases, says Morrissey, now a communications professor at Boston University’s College of Communication.

“Both are about credibility, trust and leadership, and those absolutely apply today as much as they did then,” he says. “Technology has changed, and the means of communication is faster, but you still have to show leadership and decisiveness and do the right thing quickly — regardless of the consequences.”

It was Burke’s public leadership that got Tylenol through the crisis, adds Morrissey. “He was always asking himself how to do the right thing by his customers,” he says. “And he moved with dispatch. It was a big deal, and a bold approach at that time.”

But speed ofinformation dissemination, and increased fear in society, makes situations such as the E. Coli scares more problematic for companies such as Taco Bell.

“We are in a period of higher uncertainty, so today when something like this happens, you need decisive leadership,” says Morrissey. “You need a plan in place if anything should happen and work through the details of how you’re going to respond because otherwise, in the line of fire, you’re not going to respond in a reasonable, intelligent way. Today, things happen too quickly to allow time for a forensic review of the facts before responding.”