The past couple of months have seen a rise in listeria-related findings in a fair number of products, most of them related to ice cream or other cold foods, all starting with the Texas-based company; now, it turns out that Blue Bell knew listeria was present in their products from all the way back to 2013.
Ever since the beginning of the outbreak, Food World News has reported on its progression across the country, from a wide variety of recalls from different factories of the ice cream giant to other companies' involvements such as Sabra and Amy's Kitchen, but things have gotten fairly darker since the discovery that Blue Bell knew the listeria threat.
According to Yahoo, news that Blue Bell knew the listeria threat came earlier this week by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), which has been closely investigating the company after a series of illnesses and even deaths related to their products' contamination.
The New York Times reports that not only did Blue Bell knew the listeria threat was present in one of their plants, but they chose not to clean the facilities afterwards nor recall any of their already released products contaminated with the listeria monocytogenes bacteria.
It wasn't until alarms were raised following a string of ill patients in Kansas (three of whom died because of listeriosis) that Blue Bell finally decided to step up and begin recalling products and issuing apologies.
After the release of the report, representatives for the famous southern ice cream company confirmed that Blue Bell knew the listeria contamination was present, though stating that they'd attempted to sanitize their facilities against it.
"Several swab tests did show the presence of listeria on non-food surfaces in Blue Bell's Broken Arrow plant in 2013," said Joe Robertson, a Blue Bell rep, to ABC News about the Blue Bell knew listeria contamination scandal. "As is standard procedure for any such positive results, the company would immediately clean the surfaces and swab until the tests were negative. We thought our cleaning process took care of any problems, but in hindsight, it was not adequate, which is why we are currently conducting such a comprehensive re-evaluation of all our operations."
