ConAgra Grocery Products, a subsidiary of ConAgra, has agreed to pay a fine $11.2m to resolve a decade long peanut butter case related to a countrywide outbreak of salmonella in the US.
The company has pleaded guilty of shipping adulterated food that was investigated to have caused salmonella outbreak in 2006.
While $8m would be paid as criminal fine, the remaining $3.2m would be forfeited in cash to the United States Marshals Service. The Justice Department called it the largest ever criminal fine imposed in a food safety case in the country.
None of the officials of the food company were charged in the case that was heard in the US district court for the middle district of Georgia Albany division.
The 2006 salmonella outbreak impacted 625 people across 47 states, reported by The New York Times.
Disease detectives in their investigation traced the root cause of the outbreak to have come from a food plant in Sylvester, Georgia that was manufacturing peanut butter under the Peter Pan and the Great Value brands for ConAgra and sold at Wal-Mart.
An investigation into the case revealed that ConAgra could have shipped the adulterated peanut butter products from Georgia to Texas on or about December 7, 2016. It was alleged by the investigators that the shipment contained salmonella strains after they were produced in conditions supporting the pathogen contamination.
In March 2007, ConAgra had issued a recall of all Peter Pan peanut butter and all Great Value peanut butter products made from December 2005. This was after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found strains of salmonella in ConAgra’s processing plant at Sylvester.
