Crisis management | Producers and processors must be up-front with the public, says consultant
Jeff Ansell, a communications consultant who teaches companies how to deal with media during a crisis, came to an Ottawa animal care conference with two Canadian examples in mind.
One that he spoke of publicly was what not to do in a food industry crisis.
The other, which he discussed in an interview, was what to do.
Ansell told the National Farm Animal Care Council Oct. 10 that crisis management means communicating honestly when people want information, expressing regret if you are at fault, showing empathy for those affected by the incident and promising action.
Read Also
Feeder market continues the climb
For the week ending Aug. 30, Western Canadian feeder cattle markets traded $4-8 per hundredweight higher on average.
Ansell said using that criteria, XL Foods in Alberta was a classic what-not-to-do when E. coli-contaminated products came out of its beef plant in Brooks.
XL Foods did everything wrong from a crisis communications management perspective when it tried to cope with the food safety uproar by going underground.
He said media narratives about crises typically need a victim, a villain, a hero, a witness, an expert and sometimes a “village idiot” who can become the object of ridicule.
No one died in the XL episode, but the incident resulted in the largest beef product recall in Canadian history and the temporary closing of the plant. The company was soon sold.
For days, calls to XL for information connected callers to a voice mail asking for a message.
Managers and owners did not make themselves available to answer questions or account for the tainted product.
“Respectfully, XL Foods came across as the village idiot,” said Ansell.
“XL will always be the villain, but it didn’t have to be the village idiot. It was a self-inflicted wound.”
Yet XL had a model to follow, according to Ansell.
In an interview, he said Maple Leaf Foods president Michael McCain did a classic job of crisis management when products from one of his plants killed more than 20 people and sickened scores more in 2008.
Instead of disappearing from public view and letting public relations employees appear, McCain was the public face of the crisis, taking responsibility, promising better food safety performance in the future and empathizing with the victims and their families.
He said McCain did all the right things and was voted chief executive officer of the year afterward for his performance.
“Michael McCain gets it,” he said.
At one point in the controversy, McCain said “the last people I’m taking advice from are my accountant and my lawyer,” alluding to accountant fears of money-losing lawsuits and lawyers advising against any form of guilt admission in case it led to damage lawsuits.
“I just think he understood what had to be done and did it well,” said Ansell.
He said a heightened public and industry focus on how animals are treated, make animal welfare crises stories inevitable.
He was critical of the current journalist model of conflict reporting but said the industry has to accept it and respond to any crisis with openness, transparency and a willingness to admit mistakes or responsibility if that is required.
“Don’t expect to win,” he responded to a Manitoba Pork question on how to deal with anti-hog lobby groups in the province.
“But at the end of the day, if you break even, it is a victory.”
