CBS NEWS – Food and Drug Administration officials turned up dozens of violations at a McDonald’s supplier linked to a deadly outbreak of E. coli that led to more than a hundred infections and a sweeping recall of onions used in the fast food chain’s products, including its Quarter Pounder burgers.
The violations, detailed in an inspection report released to CBS News in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, were seen during an inspection of a food production facility in Colorado run by Taylor Farms.
Their findings amounted to the FDA issuing the McDonald’s supplier a so-called Form 483, a list of citations over conditions inspectors worried could be “injurious to health.”
That facility had been tasked with supplying “slivered onions” to McDonald’s restaurants across a broad swath of states. Taylor Farms also produces a number of other products, including salads it sells in grocery stores as safe and ready to eat.
For restaurants, Taylor Farms bills its products as a “prep-less kitchen solution,” allowing food service workers to skip the usual preparation steps they would need to use with ordinary produce that should be washed and cut before eating.
“We hold our suppliers to the highest expectations and standards of food safety. Prior to this inspection, and unrelated to its findings, McDonald’s stopped sourcing from Taylor Farms’ Colorado Springs facility,” McDonald’s said in a statement.
The company pointed to its October announcement following the outbreak that it would stop buying onions from Taylor Farms in Colorado “indefinitely,” switching suppliers for some 900 restaurants that had relied on the plant …
“Several food contact surfaces that were not visually clean and should have been marked as a ‘Fail’.”
