Peanuts, Recalls, and Communication

Some companies get it, some don’t.

The massive recall from Peanut Corporation of America in January and February of 2009 has really shaken out companies who know how to communicate with their customers from those who are, frankly, clueless in that area.  However, the way the chips fell was not what I would have expected.

Take, for example, the box of Nature Valley Peanut Butter Granola bars that I had purchased before the news of the recall broke.  When I went to look at the company’s web site, there was nothing obvious on it about the recall, so I found their “contact us” link and sent off a polite query.  A few days later I got an intelligently written response from the parent company — General Mills no less — detailing the two products that were affected, and assuring me that for the Nature Valley line, they did not use that company or that processing plant at all. They answered my question with no evasiveness and no corporate doublespeak. For a large company, I found this surprising and refreshing.  The Nature Valley website now has (at the time of writing) a prominent notice about the recall, with this information.

As a counterpoint to that, look at the experience my significant other had when trying to find out if the peanut-butter flavour dog biscuits in a product line from Natura Pet were affected by the recall.  She asked a simple question: Does or did Natura use products from the affected Peanut Corporation of America plant in these dog biscuits? In other words, a simple yes/no question.  The issue here is that their web site indicated they “contain no peanut butter or peanut butter paste“, but as we pointed out, the recall has been extended to all products from the Georgia PCA plant, not just these two.  The evasiveness that resulted (in a phone call) was a classic example of corporate doublespeak and evasiveness such as we haven’t heard in a long time.  This was apparently “Proprietary information” that could not be released.  You can imagine how confident we now feel about that company’s products (and how our buying habits have now changed).

Experiences such as these are a litmus test, in my opinion, of how these companies will prosper or sink in the long run.  No matter what decisions are made in the boardrooms or marketing departments, at the end of the day it’s how you communicate with your customers that establishes the reputation of a corporate entity.   We are real people, not anonymous consumers, and if you don’t take our questions and concerns seriously, you can’t expect us to trust your products.