CBC MARKETPLACE: YOUR FOOD » FOOD SAFETY
Supermarket Secrets
Broadcast: December 11, 2005
Repeated: April 16, 2006

Joanne Lum has seen the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to supermarkets.

Joanne Lum is a health inspector in Vancouver. She’s seen the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to supermarkets.

Lum invited us to follow her for a day as she made her rounds – unannounced, of course.

The first store we stop in on looks pretty spotless, but looks can be deceiving.

Lum checks the temperature in fridges, dairy shelves, prepared food displays. She checks to make sure the taps can run hot water.

The store gets an almost-perfect rating, but it turns out Lum had called ahead because she figured it would be difficult to have our cameras tag along.

(Sure enough, some of the biggest chains wouldn’t let us in. A lot of the major supermarkets tell us they want two or three week’s notice before they’ll let a camera inside. So much for surprise visits.)

It’s impossible to know whether the first store would have scored perfectly had they not been called in advance.

To avoid the advance-warning problem, Joanne suggests we try an independent supermarket, which lets us in with our cameras rolling.

Lum is concerned to find boxes of lettuce sitting on the floor of the walk-in fridge, where meat drippings could contaminate them.

At the second supermarket, Lum spots mouse droppings on some of the store shelves. There’s a heavy buildup of dust and mould on some ceiling fans.

In the meat cooler, Lum spots a squash sitting on a shelf below two large cuts of beef – this is a no-no, because meat drippings could land on the squash and cause cross-contamination, a potentially deadly situation that occurs when bacteria from raw meat touches vegetables.

A number of cardboard boxes stuffed with lettuce are stored on the floor – another problem, because they’re resting in water that may contain meat drippings.

Outside the cooler, in the food preparation area, there are crusty puddles of dried up grease and dirt. Lum notices that the sink, where the store’s workers should wash their hands, doesn’t have any taps.

Her inspection report warns that the store has one week to shape up.

Later, we return with Lum to the store to see if things have been cleaned up. They have.

The store is pretty spotless, and everything Lum noted in her report has been corrected. “You did a lot of good work, very good,” she tells the store’s manager. “I’m pretty happy with the results.”

In a BBQ duck and meat counter, Lum’s thermometer reads just 33ºC.

Most stores reportedly fix problems after a visit by the health inspector. But public health units are under-funded. Inspectors complain that they don’t have enough time or resources to do what’s needed.

TIPS: What you can do to keep your food safe

Improper food temperature storage

The third store we check is a supermarket chain with stores in three provinces. Partway through her inspection, Lum finds a serious problem with the food storage temperatures at the store’s hot deli counter.

Hot food should be stored at 60ºC and kept out for only two hours. When she checks the store's BBQ duck and meat counter, Lum’s thermometer reads just 33ºC.

“You’re in the danger zone,” she tells the store manager. “You need to increase the temperature of that. It should be at least 60ºC. How long has this meat been sitting here?”

“Two hours,” the manager responds.

A second check of her thermometer, and Lum discovers the temperature has dropped to 27ºC in the hot case. She opens one of the packages of meat to read its internal temperature: 25ºC.

Beware of the "Bacteria Danger Zone," between 4ºC and 60ºC.

Since the store doesn’t print the time of packaging on each product, Joanne says she has no choice by to throw out everything in the store’s BBQ counter.

“It’s in the danger zone,” she repeats to the manager. “It should be up to 60ºC, unless you have it out for just two hours. But you don’t even label the times … and that’s a major no-no. So we’re going to have to discard all of this.”

Lum asks to see the BBQ counter’s temperature logs (stores need to keep logs to prove that food temperature is constantly monitored.) She’s a bit surprised to see that store workers have diligently kept track of the food storage temperatures – despite the fact that those temperatures fell far below the required 60ºC.

NOTE: Bacteria can thrive on meat and poultry products that have sat out in the danger zone (between 4ºC and 60ºC) for more than two hours – even meat that’s been thoroughly cooked. MORE: Food handling and preparation

Lum says she doesn’t like discarding food unless she’s absolutely sure it’s been improperly handled. In all, $1,000 dollars worth of food from the store’s BBQ counter is thrown out.

The health department closed down the store’s entire hot deli department for two weeks.

As it turns out, this store has a dirty history. In the past 20 months, a health inspector has told the store seven times that the meat counter isn’t hot enough.

“We basically read the riot act to them,” says Vancouver health inspector Dominic Losito.

Eventually, the health department closed down the store’s entire hot deli department for two weeks – a big financial hit – and put the staff through safe food handling training.

Losito says the store was lucky there were no reported outbreaks of foodborne illnesses: “They really did dodge a bullet. There are cases of well-run places that lose business because of a mistake or two. This was a series of mistakes.”

The law on inspections

In Toronto, if a health inspector reports that a food service establishment needs work, this yellow card is posted at the store entrance.

The law says supermarkets across the country must to be inspected. Depending on how big they are, some have three inspections a year, others just one. The health inspection reports are recorded by the inspector and given to the store manager.

Usually the consumer doesn’t see them at all – to get your hands on an inspection report you’ll likely have to file a Freedom of Information request. That takes time and costs money.

Toronto and nearby Peel Region are the only places in Canada that post a mandatory health inspection rating at the supermarket’s front door. If the store passes, you’ll see a green card at the entrance. If it needs work, there is a yellow card. If the store’s been closed because of food safety issues, there will be a bold, red sign.

Toronto Public Health also runs a website for the system, where you can check up on your local grocer.

Since the system was implemented in 2001, the stores are doing better in inspections. In 2001, about 25 per cent of them didn’t pass. Three years later, a little more than 90 per cent are getting the green pass card.

Peter Heywood is a health inspector in Ontario's Kitchener/Waterloo region - one of the few areas to post health inspections online.

The Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors (CCGD) represents a lot of the big chains we all know, where most of us do our shopping. We asked CCGD spokesman Peter Alexander whether a card system like Toronto’s would make sense for the entire grocery store industry.

“We leave the question of making law in the hands of legislators,” he said. “I think that your viewers should be reassured that if the store is open, everything in that store is safe to consume and eat.”

But we filed requests and got our hands on inspection reports from stores across the country. We brought a hidden camera into stores and did some secret testing for cleanliness levels.