Cargill is the company whose tainted beef was highlighted by the New York Times in October. Apparently that public shaming thing worked really well, because they've really cleaned up their act since then...
For the second time this year, a Fresno beef company is recalling thousands of pounds of ground beef contaminated with a drug-resistant strain of salmonella.
Beef Packers Inc., owned by Cargill, announced the recall Friday. It covers 22,723 pounds of ground beef products that were sent to stores in Arizona and New Mexico.
The Arizona Department of Health Services has linked two illnesses to the ground beef, made at the Beef Packers plant on Sept. 23. The beef was "repackaged into consumer-size packages and sold under different retail brand names," according to a news release issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service.
Safeway announced that the recall affects ground beef sold at its stores in Arizona and one outlet in Gallup, N.M. A Safeway spokesman said the recalled product is no longer in stores and urged customers to check all ground beef in their freezers and discard any with "sell by" dates of Sept. 28 through Oct. 11. Recalled products include fresh ground beef, beef patties, meat balls and stuffed peppers.
In August, Beef Packers recalled almost 826,000 pounds of ground beef contaminated with salmonella Newport, the same strain that prompted the current recall. At least 39 people were sickened in the weeks before the summer recall, which included orders produced at the plant in June.
