Baby-Food Makers Confront British Contamination Scare
By STEVE LOHR, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: May 2, 1989
LEAD: For the past week Britain has been grappling with its worst-ever case of food tampering. Jars of baby food have been contaminated across the country.
For the past week Britain has been grappling with its worst-ever case of food tampering. Jars of baby food have been contaminated across the country.
Outbreaks of this alarming strain of crime, which can have devastating consequences for the consumer-products companies involved, have been less frequent in Britain than in the United States. And Britain has never experienced catastrophic product-tampering cases like the one in Chicago in 1982, when seven died after taking doses of Tylenol, a Johnson & Johnson pain reliever, that had been laced with cyanide, or like the one in Japan in 1985, when eight people died after drinking fruit juice contaminated by weed killer.
Yet by almost any standard the British case has been dramatic and troubling. Razor blades, pins, caustic soda and slivers of glass have been found in the baby food.
The baby-food makers affected here are the nation's two largest, the British subsidiary of the H. J. Heinz Company, and Cow & Gate, a unit of the Nutricia Corporation of the Netherlands. Just as the drug industry in the United States responded to the potential tampering of food and medicine sold off the shelf by designing tamper-resistant packaging, Heinz and Cow & Gate have announced plans to replace their current jars with ones covered in a special plastic sleeve. And the British Government is studying how to strengthen security in the nation's grocery stores.
A Government minister has branded the contamination ''consumer terrorism,'' while the tabloid press has dubbed it the ''baby food panic.'' Nightly television news broadcasts have carried numerous accounts of distraught mothers who found foreign objects in jars of foods like apple sauce or vegetable puree.
For all the distress, however, there has luckily been only one reported injury: a baby girl who cut her lip.
The British baby-food scare had its origins in late March, when a blackmailer informed the British unit of H. J. Heinz, this nation's largest baby food maker, that unless the company paid him $1.7 million he would contaminate Heinz products. Heinz, as a matter of policy, refused the blackmail request. On April 7, a farmer's wife in Rayleigh, in the southeast, found a pin and caustic acid in a jar of Heinz baby food that also contained a note: ''Warning - the content is poisonous and there are three other unmarked jars on the shelf.''
In the next few weeks, there was a trickle of reports of baby-food contamination. In most cases, local police issued warnings to parents not to open baby-food jars from stores where contamination had been detected.
Cow & Gate, Britain's second-largest baby-food maker, was also a target. The companies and the British police have said they are satisfied the baby food is not being adulterated in the manufacturing process. Trickle Becomes a Wave
By last week, the trickle of reports had become a wave, forcing the police to make a public statement that disclosed the national scale of the problem and that their investigation pointed to a blackmailer. After the public announcement, the number of reported cases jumped sharply, to more than 300. But most of the new cases were ''copy-cat incidents by cranks and publicity seekers,'' according to a spokesman for Scotland Yard.
Last Friday, Heinz announced that it was replacing its existing baby-food stocks with jars that would be covered with a plastic sleeve. Heinz said the new jars would be ready by May 15. Once the newly packaged products are ready, Heinz will take old jars off the shelves and destroy them. In the meantime, the company and the British Department of Health are advising parents that it is safe to feed Heinz food to their children, but only after pouring it out of the jar onto a plate for inspection.
