In 2008, Maple Leaf Foods of Toronto had a disaster on its hands after an outbreak of the listeria bacteria in some of its packaged meat products.
Lunchmeat manufactured and packaged in Toronto under the Burns and Maple Leaf brands was infected, and there were nine confirmed and 11 suspected deaths attributed to eating the tainted meat. Others who ate the meat but recovered are still putting their lives back together, as are friends and families of all those affected.
But what is a company to do if illness or death is clearly caused by consumers eating or using your products? Do you deny everything and let the lawyers fight it out in court for a decade, hoping that the survivors will run out of gas and money? Do you spin, weave, dodge or bob around the issue and use every procedural roadblock under the sun to avoid legal liability in hopes of saving the brand’s reputation?
Do you blame the victims, the doctors, or the inspection agency charged with ensuring the safety of your product?
Maple Leaf Foods chose not to listen to its lawyers. It may have saved the company.
Here’s what it did:
First, it admitted it was the company’s fault. It admitted it was responsible. It said, in essence, “it’s our fault and we’re going to fix it.”
Second, Maple Leaf apologized. It wasn’t “wordsmithed” or spin-doctored to deny culpability. The company didn’t dodge the issue. It apologized up front in every possible media.
Third, it didn’t hire a celebrity to deliver the apology, or a blonde actress with very white teeth wearing a lab coat. CEO Michael McCain was the voice and the face of the crisis, and of the apology.
Fourth, once Maple Leaf realized the problem was the company’s fault, it acted decisively, and transparently. It recalled more than 200 packaged meat brands (amounting to tens of thousands of individual packages) that were manufactured or packaged at the affected plant.
Which brings me to one of the best quotes about using (or not using) lawyers. CEO Michael McCain said in his apology on TV and on YouTube: “Going through the crisis there are two advisers I’ve paid no attention to. The first are the lawyers, and the second are the accountants. It’s not about money or legal liability; this is about our being accountable for providing consumers with safe food. This is a terrible tragedy. To those people who have become ill, and to the families who have lost loved ones, I want to express my deepest and most sincere sympathies. Words cannot begin to express our sadness for your pain.”
One year after the tragedy, Maple Leaf Foods Inc. took out full-page ads in The Globe and Mail, the Edmonton Journal, the Vancouver Sun and other Canadian newspapers to mark the one-year anniversary of the listeria outbreak. It was framed as a letter to consumers from Mr. McCain. The ads said Maple Leaf was committed to “becoming a global leader in food safety to prevent this kind of a tragedy from ever happening again. ... On behalf of our 24,000 employees, we promise to never forget.”
In dealing with a crisis by taking responsibility for it, Maple Leaf Foods may well have saved its brands and saved the company's reputation. By telling consumers, “sorry, it’s totally our fault and we'll fix it,” despite what lawyers might have advised, there was an appreciation that someone was prepared to take responsibility for the disaster rather than weaving, dodging and bobbing to avoid legal liability.
At the end of 2008, Mr. McCain was named business newsmaker of 2008 – conducted yearly by Canadian Press – based on his handling of the crisis.
