Early this morning it was reported that the Salmonella outbreak (Salmonella Saintpaul) has now sickened more than 750 consumers. As inspectors investigate farms from Mexico to Texas and southern Florida, consumers have been expressing concern and raising questions in online communities. Much of the buzz came in immediate response to the FDA warning on June 10, 2008. In total, we’ve documented nearly 8,000 messages posted on blogs, boards and groups during the month of June. And this is just buzz. The Associated Press uploaded a video to YouTube.com on the June 5, which has received nearly 20,000 views. Salmonella Saintpaul has also prompted scores of inbound links to the FDA page: http://www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/tomatoes.html

Buzz volume for Tomato Salmonella FDA Warning

Source: Nielsen BuzzMetrics service. Buzz expressed as raw number of messages.

One of the most vocal bloggers is Salmonellablog.com (voice of the Marler Clark firm), which has dedicated more than 20 posts in recent weeks to the outbreak and calling out the FDA’s snail-like response. On boards, we tend to see more conversation related to how consumers are adjusting in the interim. Weightwatchers.com in particular has spurred a couple of hundred messages related to the outbreak. Many dieters punt questions to the community about which types of products are tainted and some mention substituting tomatoes in recipes.

“Have they found out where this started? Is it safe to eat tomatos now? Also, is it safe to eat the ones in the cans? I know this is silly, but my children asked me that last night and I can’t answer that!!”
Source: Weightwatchers.com; June 12, 2008

“Normally I’d say a tomato /mozzarella salad, but with the salmonella, go for roasted peppers with mozzarella.”
Source: Weightwatchers.com; June 21, 2008

The discussion has already dropped off precipitously. There are few indications from the nature of the current conversation that this scare will have long terms effects on category sales. If we can take any cues from the e.Coli outbreak in 2006, we may see a softening in sales in the weeks to follow. The spinach outbreak had something of a ripple effect because of the back-to-back outbreaks that year. Ultimately fresh bagged salad approached previous year levels, though sales for fresh spinach were sluggish to recover.

Sales for Precut Fresh Salad Mix and Fresh Spinach

Source: Nielsen LabelTrends; usda.gov

Beyond sales, this latest outbreak does nothing but chip away at consumer confidence in foreign-produced food and the our own government’s food inspection systems. Earlier this week, the Harvard School of Public Health released findings of a recent survey that queried consumers on just this topic. 37% of respondents believed U.S. produced food was very safe. What raises eyebrows is that 58% believed it was only “somewhat safe”; 47% deemed food from Mexico unsafe and 56% were concerned about food from China.

Memories of past outbreaks linger. In the same survey, 74% remembered the spinach recall and 82% remembered the recent ground beef recall. It remains to be seen how memorable Salmonella Saintpaul will be, but surely if the FDA doesn’t find the source soon, it will likely further instill consumers sentiment toward globally produced food and call into question US production as well.