Dive Brief:
- The former owners of Rancho Feeding Corp., as well as two employees of the defunct slaughterhouse, have been indicted on federal charges of fraud and violating the Federal Meat Inspection Act.
- The indictments stem from incidents in which meat from cancer-ridden cows was allegedly sold to brands such as Nestle's Hot Pockets.
- According to the investigators, Rancho Feeding engaged in particularly gruesome actions to perpetrate the fraud -- swapping the heads of diseased animals on carcasses with the heads of healthy animals when inspectors took their lunch breaks.
Dive Insight:
The Rancho Feeding scandal spread far and wide when the news broker earlier this year. By some estimates, the tainted meat reached 35 states, the island of Guam and an untold number of retailers.
Looking back, one of the stranger things about this case was the phrases used to describe the meat. It was called "unfit for human consumption" and "unsound" and "unwholesome." But for whatever reason it wasn't made clear during the recall just exactly what the problem was.