I am headed to Norway. On September 23 and 24 I am giving two talks at the Aquatiq Food Forum at the Clarion Hotel Oslo, to a room of food industry leaders, Mattilsynet, Nestlé, McDonald’s Nordic, Mowi, Coop, NorgesGruppen and Norsk Kylling.
Day one is called “Why It Is a Bad Idea to Poison Your Customers.” Day two is “The Criminalization of Food Safety Failures.” They are one argument in two parts, and the second half is the part that has changed most in the last two years. The program is here: Aquatiq Food Forum 2026.
The first title gets a laugh when I say it out loud. It should not. In thirty-three years of representing people hurt by contaminated food, I have never met a company that set out to poison anybody. That is the whole point. The harm comes from a supplier nobody audited, a swab nobody took, a positive nobody acted on, a shipment somebody released because the alternative was expensive that week.
Day one: the business case
I will start where I always start, with two people. Stephanie Smith was twenty years old and teaching dance at three studios when she ate a hamburger in September 2007. She was in the hospital until June of the following year. E. coli O157:H7, hemolytic uremic syndrome, a stroke, brain injury, dialysis, transplants ahead of her, and no children. The jury numbers in her case were $1.9 million in past medical bills, $29.4 million in future care and $1.2 million in lost earnings. Notice the shape of that. The past medical bills are the smallest number. The expensive part of a catastrophic injury is the fifty years that follow it.
Linda Rivera was a mother of six who worked with disabled children. She ate raw cookie dough in May 2009 and was hospitalized until May 2011. Large intestine removed, stroke, liver failure, congestive heart failure. She missed three of her children’s graduations. She survived the outbreak and died later of its consequences.
Norway already knows this story
I do not need to import all of my examples. In the winter of 2006, Norwegian pediatricians reported a cluster of HUS cases to Folkehelseinstituttet. Seventeen people were identified with E. coli O103:H25 between February 20 and April 6. Ten children developed HUS. One of them died. The source was a traditional cured mutton sausage, morrpølse, from a single plant — 3.5 tonnes of it, sold nationwide. It took 931 food and environmental samples to find, and the strain was followed from the finished sausage back to a mutton supplier, a slaughterhouse and four farms (Schimmer et al., BMC Infectious Diseases 2008;8:41).
That is Norway’s Jack in the Box. It is worth adding the uncomfortable part, which the investigators published themselves: the first case-control study pointed at minced beef from a different producer, and the public was warned about the wrong product in February. The sausage was not identified until March 20. Their own stated lesson was to keep chasing alternative sources after you have already warned the public.
What actually destroys companies
Thirty-three years produces some pattern recognition. It is not the pathogen. Every processor will have a positive; that is not the story. It is the delay between knowing and telling, which juries and regulators count in hours. It is the denial, because attacking the health department is the most expensive sentence a company can say. It is the pattern, because one outbreak is bad luck and a file of prior noncompliances is a case. And it is the paper, because the email written to reassure a colleague becomes exhibit 14.
Most boards model one line of the cost — the verdict. Underneath it sit the recall, the plant suspension and requalification, the lost listings, and the covenants and valuation. Those four are, in practice, uninsurable, which is exactly backwards from how companies budget for this.
And then the good news
I end day one with the best thing that happened in food safety in my lifetime. Jack in the Box in 1993 produced more than 600 confirmed infections and killed four children. In 1994 USDA declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in raw ground beef. HACCP followed, then testing with consequences. The 2002 ConAgra recall was the last of the great hamburger cases I litigated. Today my firm handles essentially none of them.
Government action took a large part of my practice away, and I am grateful. The industry fought that rule, called it a travesty, and sued the USDA over it. Those same companies are still in business thirty years later selling a safer product. Nothing about beef made it uniquely fixable. What has been missing for leafy greens, ready-to-eat meats and powdered infant formula is not technology. It is a clear standard and a price for missing it.
Day two: when it stops being about money
The second talk is colder. Civil cases mean a company pays and insurance absorbs part of it. Criminal cases mean a named person is charged, and insurance does not cover a prison sentence. The trigger is almost never the pathogen. It is the concealment.
Stewart Parnell of Peanut Corporation of America is serving twenty-eight years. Nine people died and 714 were infected across 46 states, but he was not convicted of killing anyone. He was convicted of what he told customers about laboratory results — the certificates, the positive retested until it came back negative, and fifteen years of ordinary internal email read aloud to a jury. Look at who else was indicted: the owner, his brother, a plant operator, a plant manager, and the quality assurance manager. That last one is the person sitting in the room in Oslo.
Intent is not required. Under the Park doctrine a person can be convicted under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act without proof of knowing or willful conduct, on the basis that they held a position that would have let them prevent the violation. The Jensen brothers pleaded to a five-count information after their cantaloupes killed thirty-three people — I represented all thirty-three families — and nobody alleged they lied about anything. The DeCosters went to jail for three months each on a record with no proof of knowledge, and it was upheld on appeal.
The front line has moved to Europe
The most active food safety prosecutions in the world right now are not American. A British restaurant owner is serving six years for gross negligence manslaughter after substituting a cheaper nut mix and killing a customer who had written “no nuts” on the order. In France, Nestlé France and its subsidiary were placed under formal investigation in July 2024 over the Buitoni pizzas that gave 48 children HUS and killed two. Lactalis and its Craon subsidiary were placed under formal investigation in 2023 — and one of the allegations is failure to execute withdrawal and recall measures. Not contaminating the food. Failing to recall it properly.
That charge has no American equivalent, and it flows from architecture Norway already shares. Article 19 of Regulation 178/2002 puts primary responsibility on the food business operator and requires immediate withdrawal and notification. Norway took that regulation into the EEA Agreement in 2007, and Mattilsynet enforces it under the Food Act. A duty framed as immediate is a duty a prosecutor can measure in hours. Measure your own interval, because somebody else will.
Meanwhile America is stepping back
This is the part that will surprise a European audience. Executive Order 14294, signed in May 2025, states that criminal enforcement of strict liability regulatory offenses is generally disfavored and directs prosecution as a last resort. It does not repeal the Park doctrine. It changes who is willing to use it. The Justice Department moved to disband the Consumer Protection Branch that historically handled these cases. The Abbott infant formula investigation was closed in 2026.
And Boar’s Head, where ten people died and two members of Congress asked the Attorney General to consider charges, has produced no public answer at all. I filed a FOIA request in June asking what happened. Seventy-eight pages came back on July 2. Nothing in them says whether anyone is still working the case. What I did notice is that the law enforcement exemption USDA claimed in 2024 is no longer being cited. I cannot prove what that means, and I will say so from the platform.
The through line
Nobody sets out to poison anyone. Every person I have watched be charged believed they were managing a business problem. The evidence came from their own files, written by good people under commercial pressure. Which makes day two the same argument as day one: it is cheaper to be safe.
If you are in Oslo on the 23rd and 24th, come find me.
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