Blue Bell

At the end of 2016 the wife and I took a trip to Houston to see Kansas State play Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl. We're both big KSU fans, and we had a great time hanging out in the team hotel.

One gentleman we met was a cousin of a friend of ours. He is a member of the bowl committee and also an executive with Blue Bell Ice Cream. Our friend asked him how the recall was going, and he said they were just getting their product back out on store shelves at 100%. My thought was that this was in reference to the listeria outbreak of 2015 in which three people died. I didn't need any real clarification.

I've seen a couple of things since then. Blue Bell's largest plant, in Brenham, Texas reopened in November of 2016. It was a pretty rough time for the company, as they laid off over 1,400 full-time and part-time workers, or about 37% of the workforce. Another 1,400 were furloughed. A second thing is that there was a second though smaller recall in late summer 2016. They're just now getting things back up to speed and getting their product back into store freezers.

I've also seen a writeup from the Arthur Page Society that indicates the lack of a clear crisis communications plan as well as the lack of a Chief Communication Officer. This gets into Excellence Theory, specifically where they talk about the lack of a communications professional in the C-Suite. It seems simple to a PR type such as myself, but many times a company's crisis situation is made worse by executives with no PR backgrounds.

The Arthur Page report says Blue Bell hired a PR firm after the listeria outbreak, and seemed to have very little in the way of active PR at the time of the outbreak. Blue Bell chose to make their website the primary point of contact. Their Facebook account suddenly saw more activity once the outbreak was common knowledge and they created a Twitter account to help communicate during the time of crisis.

The more points of contact you have, the better, though it sounds to me that their concern had more to do with company protocols and not public relations, though the PR activity/response needed help.

Dr. Grunig, originator of Excellence Theory, has a good point in that if a PR pro has a respected voice in the boardroom, this may have gone differently. But Blue Bell is a Texas thing, and Texans have a heaping dose of state pride. That is, they really like being Texan. That and Blue Bell has been around for over 100 years, so they had a bit of a reputation. So statewide the damage might not have been so bad from an image restoration perspective. It might be a slightly different matter nationally.

Blue Bell's real work is in progress-- gaining back their reputation after the three deaths, personnel layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts, lost revenue, as well as suppliers further down the food chain that needed Blue Bell's business. Lots of people were adversely affected by this, and it'll take time.