The Tuna Scare

MARKETING & SELLING

The nation's grocery shelves were carefully searched last week for cans imprinted with the telltale code WY2 and WY3-They contained tuna fish packed by San Francisco's Washington Packing Corp.--and they were the worst news the $277 million tuna industry has ever had. When two Detroit women died from food poisoning after eating a bad can of A. & P. tuna packed by Washington, health authorities across the U.S. began searching out other cans of Washington tuna marketed under various brand names. New York officials discovered bad tuna sold under a Dagim Tahorim kosher label, sent inspectors to hundreds of groceries to search for the suspect cans. WY2 and WY3 cans also turned up in Cleveland, and inspectors searched out Washington Packing shipments to stores in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Augusta, Ga.

All the publicity seems to have made many Americans temporarily lose their taste for tuna. A careful shopper could check the lid for the telltale number in a grocery, but it seemed chancier to trust a restaurant or a drugstore counter with a tuna fish sandwich or salad. Food Fair's Howard Miller, the chief grocery buyer for the chain's New Jersey, New York and Connecticut stores, estimated that tuna sales were down 30%. Tuna sales fell in Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco. Van Camp Vice President F. E. Hagelberg saw "no question" but that the scare would eventually "have an adverse effect on sales," and an executive for Chicken of the Sea moaned, "I think it's costing the industry millions of dollars in sales."

The A. & P., whose tuna started the scare, removed all of its Washington-packed tuna fish from the shelves, offered to return the purchase price not only of its own brand tuna but of any brand a customer wished to redeem. Tiny Washington Packing, which cans tuna for a variety of labels (Tastewell, Ocean Beauty, Drake's Bay, Tuna-4-Cats) and has never had trouble before, closed down its plant as cases of tuna began to return to the company. No one accused the firm of any violations of health regulations that would account for the presence of the deadly spores in the cans, and no one knew exactly how many bad cans were still on shelves. Hoping that the public reaction would not match 1959's cranberry scare, the tuna industry was clearly apprehensive, pointed out that in the 45 years of its existence it had canned 12 billion cans of tuna without a fatality.

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