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Blue Bell ice cream will return to grocery stores in Dallas-Fort Worth on November 2 but details on what derailed the Brenham creamery are still coming out.
A few former employees from the Blue Bell plant in Brenham spoke to CBS News, claiming conditions inside the plant were hazardous to the public’s health years before the recall.
It was listeria, a potentially deadly bacteria, that is uncommon in ice cream.
“Sometimes the machines would just go haywire, the product would run through the conveyor belt and just drop right onto the floor”, Shultz told CBS News.
Stopping to clean the ice cream would slow down production, Schultz explained, so workers left it on the floor, where bacteria could grow and flourish.
Bland also described other instances of unsanitary practices, including pouring ice cream and fruit juice drippings-often contaminated with machine oil-into barrels of ice cream mix for later use.
The company also says it’s making good progress in reopening its Brenham plant, but at this point there is no date set for it to reopen.
Five-year Blue Bell veteran Gerald Bland shared that he has operated a fruit feeder in the plant.
This story is one in a series CBS News is doing on Blue Bell.
As KENS 5 reported, Blue Bell halted production and recalled all of its products in April 2015 after an outbreak of the bacteria listeria was traced back to the famed ice cream maker, including items produced at the Brenham plant. “Blue Bell is going to do anything and everything they can to make sure this doesn’t happen again”.
“Well, God bless Blue Bell, ” said Terry Schultz.
“Nothing changed, nothing”, he said.
For Davis, the finding really hit home – she actually had Blue Bell products in her freezer that she had handed out at a kid’s birthday party. There were reportedly no unannounced FDA inspections at the Brenham, TX plant. “Two weeks before we shut down, that was when they changed the procedures”.
Blue Bell subsequently laid off or furloughed about 37 percent of its almost 4,000 employees, the first such action in the family-owned company’s 108-year history. “A lot of things were over looked and passed on in favor of volume and expansion and I think that’s the part that people aren’t seeing”. But in a statement to CBS News they wrote: “We are committed to ensuring that we are producing a safe product through our enhanced manufacturing procedures, including increased focus on sanitation and cleaning, ongoing evaluation from independent microbiologists, voluntary agreements with our state regulators, and finally, a test and hold procedure”.
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This means they can not distribute any product they produce until a test confirms it is safe. But, their flagship plant in Brenham, Texas, is still closed.
