After Chobani announced a voluntary recall of products made in its Twin Falls, Idaho plant earlier this month due to a mold contamination, Brown Dining Services pulled all cups of the Greek yogurt from its eateries, only to put them back on its shelves yesterday.
At least 89 people across the country have fallen ill after consuming Chobani products, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Whether the yogurt was responsible is unknown, since the FDA does not consider mold species found in the Chobani products a foodborne pathogen, according to the company website.
Though the Chobani products in Brown eateries were not made in the Idaho plant, Dining Services decided to pull Chobani anyway, wrote Ann Hoffman, director of administration at Dining Services in an email to The Herald.
“It is our usual protocol to pull a product when we learn it has been recalled,” Hoffman wrote. “Given our experience with recalls, we knew this one could expand in scope.”
The most recent recall that resulted in the removal of a product from Dining Services facilities occurred in 2009, when products that contained peanuts or pistachios were suspected of salmonella contamination. In that case, the FDA’s list of contaminated products kept growing on a daily basis, and all products containing peanuts were removed from University dining establishments, The Herald reported at the time.
The Rhode Island Department of Health has yet to encounter any reported cases of illness from moldy Chobani products, said Erica Collins, a department spokeswoman. If Chobani-related illnesses begin to occur, the department has a set of guidelines in place to respond to the recall.
“There’s a variety of ways we make sure the public remains safe in a situation like that,” Collins said. “We send press releases to alert the media in case they hadn’t picked up any press releases issued by the manufacturer, we shoot emails to affected restaurants, we place calls to restaurants, we send food inspectors to inspect the situation. It all depends on the situation and the severity of the threat.”
Before Dining Services reinstated Chobani, Hoffman wrote that Dining Services would seek to make another brand of Greek yogurt available if the recall persisted for longer than was expected.
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