If you are having a turkey this Thanksgiving, do you know where it was processed? If it came from certain North Carolina processing plants, it may have been processed on dirty equipment, records obtained by Carolina Public Press show.
Federal inspectors found black residue on conveyor belts, accumulated waste on production floors and documentation failures at three major turkey processing plants in North Carolina during the peak production season leading up to Thanksgiving.
The most recent noncompliance reports from the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service, or FSIS, show systemic sanitation violations throughout October at Prestage Foods and Butterball processing facilities.
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Such conditions persist across the poultry industry because federal inspectors lack meaningful enforcement tools, Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, told CPP.
“We don’t have a good poultry inspection system because there’s not an effective enforcement mechanism,” Gremillion said.
“The inspectors can take the nuclear option and shut down the plant. Other than that, it’s a game of chicken. They don’t have good tools. There are no big penalties for dirty establishments. Inspectors point out noncompliances and then get ignored.”
Prestage Foods sanitation issues
Prestage Foods owns and operates a turkey processing facility in St. Pauls, in Robeson County. On Oct. 23, an inspector with FSIS visited Prestage and found:
- Black and brown substances and particles of fat “too numerous to count” on multiple conveyor belts, suggesting the establishment had not removed product residues from previous production runs
- A turkey trachea approximately 3.5″ long left on equipment, indicating the equipment hadn’t properly been cleaned
- Condemned product barrels on the production floor
The facility was allowed to resume operations that same day after addressing the violations. In response to questions about the failed October inspection, Prestage Foods responded:
“Our commitment to providing safe, wholesome turkey products drives our daily operations at Prestage Foods. As a result, maintaining high standards when it comes to food safety is a priority — in fact, it’s essential to our business,” said Deborah Johnson, communications director for Prestage Foods.
“We operate with federal oversight in our facility at all times and our daily operating procedures and plans are required to be in compliance with USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. When any issue is identified, our quality assurance team acts swiftly to correct it and prevent recurrence.”
Butterball turkey plant violations
Butterball processes ground turkey at two locations in North Carolina: one plant is in Mount Olive in Duplin County and another is in Raeford in Hoke County.
Both Butterball locations violated their Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures in October, according to FSIS reports. The Raeford plant is the second-largest employer in Hoke County. It also is a hotspot for salmonella, according to ProPublica’s Chicken Checker tool. A concerning 21.6% of the turkey samples from the Raeford plant tested positive for salmonella.
That’s all the more unsettling in light of the current atmosphere of deregulation. The Trump administration withdrew proposed standards that would have prohibited companies from sending products with high levels of salmonella to stores, according to Gremillion.
On Oct. 27, an FSIS inspector visited the Butterball plant in Raeford. The facility failed inspection, but much of the noncompliance report is redacted. The report appears to center less on dirty equipment than on a lackluster documentation system. Because of recordkeeping failures, employees could not prove that critical sanitation steps were actually performed. The inspector found:
- Monitoring activities were not performed at required intervals
- Quality Assurance supervisors and managers were not properly informed of compliance issues
- Records on Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures were not kept adequately
Earlier in the month, on Oct. 15, the Mount Olive Butterball location failed inspection. On Oct. 17, the inspector went back to the plant and wasn’t appeased. They found:
- An “excessive” amount of turkey drumsticks and bones along the back wall
- A failure to properly notify the Ground Turkey Supervisor about unsanitary conditions
“Butterball takes food safety very seriously, and our production facilities have numerous USDA personnel onsite continually monitoring the production process,” said Alice Johnson, senior vice president of food safety, quality and animal care at Butterball.
“The instances noted are from daily observation and are considered minor issues needing attention and remediation. These are promptly addressed, and the USDA verifies that we are back in compliance.”
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