The recent outbreak of salmonella in the United States has cost the Food industry over 250 million dollars. It now turns out that cost may have been entirely their own fault.

The Food and Drug Administration first thought that the salmonella bacteria was being spread by tomatoes and it took them four months of intensive investigation until they discovered that the culprit was actually jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico.

In that time nearly 13 hundred people had fallen ill.

The FDA had difficulty tracing the source of the salmonella because of poor record keeping and the lack of electronic tracking methods in the Food industry. The FDA spent considerable time chasing rumors and false leads because they had no concrete data from the industry to help shape their investigative searches.

In 2002 the FDA had issued a series of recommendations that would have required the Food industry to tighten their record keeping methods and introduce electronic tracking.

The Food industry immediately began to lobby President Bush that the FDA proposals were too much of a burden, to expensive and could hinder consumers from getting their favorite foods.

During 2003 and 2004 the industry mounted a strong effort to pressure the White House to soften the FDA recommendations.

Business groups in the food business met with White House officials at least 10 times over a period of a year as the FDA regulations were being considered. The lobbyists used the familiar argument that the proposed regulations would saddle the industry with unnecessary costs and ultimately be detrimental to the consumer.

Millions of dollars were spent on the lobbying effort including 2.6 million by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and 1.7 million by the Food Marketing Institute, and there were many others, Kraft Foods, the Kroger Company, Safeway, Procter and Gamble and more.

The White House finally agreed with the Food industry and watered down the FDA food safety expert’s recommendations.

Then this past April people began to fall ill from salmonella poisoning.

As the numbers of ill people began to rise so did the costs of lost sales to the Food industry.

The 250 million dollar loss now has the Food Industry changing their attitude about more effective produce tracking systems.

They now say that they would welcome a better tracing system operated by the government as long as the industry has a say on how to design it.

“We support the government requiring industry to have traceability systems that are effective and work,” said Jill Hollingsworth, a group vice president for food safety programs at the Marketing Institute. “But industry has to come up with a system that follows products throughout the food chain.”

This is the same Institute that complained in 2003 that the FDA proposed tracking system “would be exorbitantly costly.”

The White House defended its actions in dealing with the intensive lobbying effort from the food industry in 2003 and 2004 by saying that it regularly meets with a variety of groups and individuals that have a stake in proposed government rulings.

“Our door is open to anyone, from non-profits, industry representatives to individual citizens, who request meetings on regulations,” said Jane Lee, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget at the White House.