JOE MANDAK
Associated Press
PITTSBURGH – One year ago, more than 600 people were sickened from hepatitis A-tainted green onions served at a Chi-Chi’s restaurant. Four of the victims died.
Since then, the Louisville, Ky.-based Chi-Chi’s chain has vanished and more than 300 legal claims have been settled for about $10 million.
Most important, the produce industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have taken steps to make the nation’s fresh fruit and vegetables safer. Industry officials and food safety experts say new voluntary guidelines have made the food supply safer than ever, but some consumer advocates say the public will be protected only if the rules become mandatory.

In 1997, the FDA set food safety and cleanliness guidelines for farmers and packers after a series of food poisoning outbreaks linked to fresh produce. This summer, a new Produce Safety Action Plan was adopted to cover the entire supply chain – right down to retail outlets.
“We’ve had a number of outbreaks, not just the one related to green onions in Pennsylvania, but that is one of several outbreaks that sort of forced us to go down this road,” said Nega Beru, a top official with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
The FDA guidelines include hygiene rules for everyone handling fresh produce from the farm to the grocery cart and procedures that allow the source of tainted food to be traced more quickly.
Food safety experts say the guidelines will help an industry already policing itself in the wake of lawsuits spawned by tainted tomatoes, cantaloupes, alfalfa sprouts, green onions and other items in recent years.
Most major restaurant chains and food outlets require produce suppliers to follow the FDA’s 1997 guidelines, and hire outside firms to audit compliance, said Devon Zagory, senior vice president of Davis Fresh Technologies LLC of Davis, Calif., a food safety consultant. But those precautions break down sometimes.
“If I’m a big grower-shipper … I may contract with some other green onion-growing company and they’re committed to supplying me a certain volume. But they may not produce enough so they go to someone else, and so on,” Zagory said.
If even one of those firms doesn’t comply with the FDA rules, then any customer of the big grower-shipper could be at risk, he said.
In the Chi-Chi’s outbreak, discovered in early November 2003, the FDA found that four Mexican farms did not follow food safety guidelines. Even though the guidelines are voluntary for U.S. firms, the FDA has banned imports from those Mexican farms until they comply, said spokesman Michael Herndon.
Safe Tables Our Priority of Burlington, Vt., a food safety advocacy group formed by the families of those affected by the deadly 1993 E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants, wants the new rules to be mandatory.
“We’re always grateful when additional food safety measures are proposed by government, however, we just don’t think guidelines are strong enough and really protecting public health and safety,” said Nancy Donley, the group’s president.
“Now there are going to be some companies that will follow the guidelines and do everything they can, but unfortunately there will be others that won’t and that’s just the real world. We feel if you have something as important as public health and safety it should be backed by law,” carrying penalties other than the threat of lawsuits, Donley said.
But industry officials say food producers are getting the message.
“There is much more pressure downward to the rest of the (supply) chain to say, ‘What are you doing to make this (safety compliance) happen?'” said Donna Garren, vice president of scientific and technical affairs at the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association. “We see a lot more scrutiny.”
That’s because the stakes are so high – for the growers, the middlemen and consumers.
Chi-Chi’s was already in Chapter 11 before the green onion outbreak at the restaurant at Beaver Valley Mall in western Pennsylvania. The company hoped to emerge from bankruptcy but instead sold its 76 remaining restaurants to Outback Steakhouse Inc. of Tampa, Fla., in September for $42.5 million.
Coronet Foods Inc. of Wheeling, W.Va., went belly-up in October, three months after reports that Roma tomatoes it supplied sickened more than 300 who ate at Sheetz convenience stores in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and Virginia. The FDA found no trace of the salmonella bacteria in question at Coronet’s plant where the tomatoes were processed and bagged.
And then there are those who got sick – or died.
Andy Weisbecker, an attorney with the Seattle-based food litigation firm Marler Clark, which represents about 100 of those sickened, said the Chi-Chi’s outbreak did for produce safety what the Jack in the Box outbreak did for the beef industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture toughened meat and poultry standards after 700 people got sick and four died from undercooked hamburgers they ate in Washington state.
“I have noticed the obviously increased focus on produce as a conduit for these kinds of infections, and Chi-Chi’s is obviously the most notorious example,” Weisbecker said. “We have had other outbreaks linked to green onions before Chi-Chi’s, but nobody really paid attention to it before.”
Chi-Chi’s attorney David Ernst said the company focused on the human toll and worked with plaintiffs’ attorneys to settle about 330 of more than 400 legal claims filed against Chi-Chi’s – a rate he says “borders on the unprecedented.” About 50 of those were settled for $35,000 or more, which means they require bankruptcy court approval – including one stemming from a person who died.
Chi-Chi’s, or what remains of it on paper in bankruptcy court, has sued Castellini Co. of Wilder, Ky., for allegedly supplying the tainted onions.
“A lot of these guys are in court finding their butts getting sued,” said Zagory, the food safety consultant. “I think that’s caught the attention of a lot of people in the industry – that the chain of custody, or supply, has to be a lot more explicit.”