Regulatory capture at work.
Inspector visits the "dirty" bigCo factory and they have an expensive binder for him showing him why everything they do he could possibly take issue is "compliant", citing relevant law, guidelines, specs, etc, etc.
Inspector visits the squeaky clean small time factory and proceeds to write out thousands of dollars of fines for petty things that could have been compliant had the owners had the money to pay to produce all the paperwork showing why their stuff is GTG.
And the inspector and everyone his organization works for say this is all great, and of course they've got self-serving metrics to prove it, because those organizations naturally fill up with people who don't question the premises of what they're doing.
Just about every industry has this going on to a large enough it's a problem degree. It's a pretty f-ed up state of affairs but it won't change because there's so many careers and even entire industries built around it.
Regulatory capture here on HN is turning into a meaningless phrase. Whenever a business does something wrong, rather than actually say what's wrong someone just claims it's regulatory capture. It's turned into it's own thought terminating cliche.
Say what the issue is, don't just blame an assumed regulatory capture. In this case state that it's insufficient regulation of the meat processing industry, infrequent inspections of processing plants, or understaffed agencies.
Say what the issues were, not a nebulous "regulatory capture" claim.
Businesses lobby to get FDA regulations weakened - state that's the problem, not a vague "regulatory capture" phase.
bell-cot•1h ago
potato3732842•1h ago
Your statement is actively misleading (i.e. lying).
After a little digging. That statement was made in 2022 when the CFO, who reports to the company president, who does some of the job of CEO but who reports to some unclear structure of family personalities above him who do a lot of the more strategic bits, was being deposed in a lawsuit (and this would make him very careful about what he says) among members of that family who owned the company. So it's not like he doesn't know who's calling the shots. He doesn't know who the CEO is in the most strict legal technicality sense.
https://fortune.com/2024/10/14/boars-head-deli-company-ceo-o...
I'm sure they've got some slapdash plants and a whole bunch of stuff that needs correcting, but taking something that's tangential to that and acting like it matters is a great illustration of one of the many things wrong with modern discourse.
hollerith•1h ago
bell-cot•18m ago
> According to a deposition from 2022, when asked who the CEO of the company was, CFO Steve Kourelakos, a two-decade Boar’s Head veteran, answered, “I’m not sure.”
Based on the Ars article (grim problems discovered at 3 other Boar's Head plants, long after the revelations about their Jarratt facility) your "some unclear structure of family personalities above him" has no real interest in food safety. Which was my point. I did not accuse them of being Bond villains, nor selling Soylent Green.
(FWIW, "some slapdash plants and a whole bunch of stuff that needs correcting" seems a rather misleading summary of the grim details of the inspections of their facilities. Ditto of their demonstrated disinterest in correcting anything.)