Bad test closes business

March 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO

Dan Kotara’s 35 years of grinding meat into hamburger ended last year after a single positive test for a potentially deadly strain of E. coli. Unable to market thousands of pounds of meat, he rented a trash bin and doused the meat in black ink to render it unusable.

His loss: an estimated $25,000.

After that August test, Kotara decided he could no longer risk another costly positive result. He laid off his eight employees and sold the grinders, massive freezers and other equipment. He is selling his building, too, so it can be razed for a parking lot.

What rankles Kotara is that federal meat-safety inspectors never identified the source of the contamination or connected it to a deficiency at his small plant. He could do everything right at Prange Meats Inc., his family business, yet still lose money because of shoddy practices at one of his suppliers, he concluded.

“Is this the right way to do things? No, I don’t think so,” Kotara said as he walked through his empty plant. “The right way to do things is to address the problem at the root, and that’s on the kill floor.”

The closing of Prange Meats Inc. is emblematic of a persistent problem with meat safety that the Chicago Tribune examined last month: The U.S. Department of Agriculture does not try to identify the source of contamination after a routine test comes up positive.

The case shows how one incident can result in the shuttering of a business built up over decades, no matter how committed it is to safety and sanitation. By all accounts, Kotara had a good record, without a single positive test for E. coli before last year.

Kotara said he could have absorbed the financial loss, but the chance of another test coming back positive was more uncertainty than he could take.