Week #4: Term Project Part 2 - Abstract and Detailed Outline SNew Apus

Running Head: ETHICAL BEHAVIORAL ISSUES 1

ETHICAL BEHAVIORAL ISSUES 2

Ethical Behavioral Issues

Mona Parker

RMLT 307 D001 Summer 2021

September 27, 2021

Professor Stites

Abstract

Ethics are a key component to businesses. They define moral policies of companies. They are used to uphold companies to a certain standard. Ethics brings a community together. Disobeying ethical standards can result in consequences. Ethical policies are constitutions to companies’ beliefs; it allows companies to gain an audience who believes in the same things. Businesses have a duty to create an ethical contract they will commit to. The food and beverage is one of the industries where ethical marketing has substantial considerations especially when it comes to handling the products. (Lim, 2016). SanLu ineffectively lacked the role of promoting health to their consumers simply through their actions. Irresponsibly, SanLu was selling contaminated products to their consumers. This incident was a lasting one; Chinese residents will forever have a negative schema associated with SanLu. The company’s morals were questioned and still to this day is an alarming subject. The notion of corporations taking responsibility for health is heavily contested. (Tempels, 2017) This implies that in evaluating the moral role of the food industry, one should focus not only on backward-looking responsibility (involving questions of praise and blame) but on forward-looking responsibility as well: from an ethical perspective, what can and should food companies do to promote health? (Tempels, 2017)

Ethical Behavioral Issues

In 2008, SanLu, a Chinese dairy producing company, went through an extreme altercation with their products. SanLu began in 1996 and took the name of the oldest and strongest dairy firm in China. As sales continued to grow with this company, they joined venture in 2005 with Fonterra, a dairy firm in New Zealand. It wasn’t until December 2007, where SanLu began to receive complaints about the products their consumers were purchasing. Most consumers noticed issues with their infants, as one of the products SanLu produced was infant formula. These beginning issues were alarming to most as infants were becoming ill with kidney stones. Kidney stones are common in adults who suffer from drinking less water, poor diet, little exercise, etc. To see these issues in babies raised alarming attention to the consumers of SanLu. SanLu failed to recognize the problem immediately because according to their food and drug regulator, the company passed all needed tests to locate the problem during the time of these early complaints. However, the problem began to grow. Zhang Zhuoyu, a local doctor of the region, took the initiative to report all cases of infants with kidney stones. Zhang, morally, couldn’t ignore these abnormal cases as stated before infants usually are not subjected to obtaining kidney stones.

The Case of SanLu

The cases were sent to the Local Health Bureau for investigation and shortly after, sent to the National Health Bureau for further investigation. During this time, SanLu was doing all they could to keep the media from spreading this threatening news nationally. SanLu was a large and vital company to Chinese residents. They also were involved with over twenty-two companies, including, Yili, a major supplier of Beijing’s Olympics. SanLu didn’t re-test their products until late July of 2008. Using their critical thinking skills, the company was able to associate their problem with an incident that happened in the U.S. earlier that same year. In this case, the U.S. found levels of the poisonous chemical in their pet food which was killing cats and dogs. The FDA concluded; the products were being imported and produced on a farm from China as a wheat gluten contaminated with melamine. Melamine is a nitrogen-based chemical used to produce all kinds of products including plastic dishware. Kidney stones is a result of consuming this chemical especially in infants due to their undeveloped digestive system. It was this incident that ruined the entire dairy industry and food industry (Su, Yong. et. Al, 2008).

The Consequences of Melamine

The food regulator of China discovered high levels of melamine in their powder. Soon after this discovery, The Food and Drug Administration of China also found high levels of melamine in the company’s products. The administration further demanded all consumers to return tainted milk to the manufacturer (Lim, 2016). SanLu use of the chemical in their milk powder resulted in deathly consequences. There was a total of four deaths and over six thousand cases reported by September of that year. The reaction of consumers to this news caused sales in SanLu’s business to decline drastically. SanLu ethical code of fair transaction was broken. Furthermore, Sanlu also infringed on the moral and legal rights of consumers as indicated in the constitution of People’s Republic of China (Su, Yong. Et al, 2008). The company failed to warn their consumers of the ingredients in their commodities. Without warnings, consumers are not assured to a fair transaction. Our analysis identifies both ethical strengths and weaknesses of food warnings, including that: 1) warnings are likely to generate important benefits including

increased consumer understanding and informed choice, healthier purchases, and potential reductions in obesity prevalence; (Physiology and Behavior 2020)

Reference Page

Thornton, et al. “Food Ethics: Moral Marketing.” Institute of Food Science and Technology, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 5 Mar. 2020, https://ifst.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsat.3401_11.x.

Grummon, A. H., Hall, M. G., Block, J. P., Bleich, S. N., Rimm, E. B., Taillie, L. S., & Barnhill, A. (2020, August 1). Ethical considerations for food and beverage warnings. Johns Hopkins University. Retrieved September 27, 2021, from https://jhu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/ethical-considerations-for-food-and-beverage-warnings.

Tempels, T., Verweij, M., & Blok, V. (2017, March). Big food's Ambivalence: Seeking profit and responsibility for health. American journal of public health. Retrieved September 27, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296687/.

Ethical behavior issues in handling food and beverage products. Online Essay Writing Services, Homework Help. (2020, April 29). Retrieved September 27, 2021, from https://www.essaysexperts.net/blog/ethical-behavior-issues-in-handling-food-and-beverage-products-returned-to-a-manufacturing-company-and-retail-stores/.