HUDS Slow to Remove Recalled CLIF Bars

Bleary-eyed students reaching for a midnight snack in Lamont Library may have more pressing concerns than assignments and deadlines: as late as last Thursday, the library’s café still stocked nutrition bars that had been recalled during a nation-wide salmonella outbreak.

Clif Bar & Company announced a voluntary recall of various CLIF and LUNA bars on Jan. 30, citing “concerns that the recalled bars contain peanut products that were manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), which is the focus of an ongoing Salmonella investigation.”

Clif’s Web site lists Chocolate Chip Peanut Crunch bars with sell-by dates between Oct. 9, 2008 and Dec. 31, 2009 as one of their recalled selections. Bars of that variety with a sell-by date of July 25, 2009—well within the affected date range—remained on Lamont café shelves last Thursday.

“It’s kind of disturbing,” said Iram A. Nadroo, a second year Divinity School student who says that she often sees students buying food from the café.

Harvard University Dining Services spokeswoman Crista Martin said that HUDS, which counts Lamont Library cafe among its retail dining locations, uses a “sophisticated system of notification” to receive information from the Food and Drug Administration and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health about the ever-expanding list of recalled products. Martin also stated that HUDS “continuously checks” that none of the items are offered by the University.

“In the case of CLIF bars, we immediately contacted every operation and told them to pull them off the shelves,” Martin said.

But the implicated CLIF bar was still stocked at Lamont on Thursday Feb. 5—six days after Clif’s press release on Jan. 30.

Martin initially said she was unsure whether any HUDS-offered product was even affected by the recall.

“I know that we stocked Clif bars, but frankly, I don’t know if we even had the implicated flavors,” she said.

Later on, Martin confirmed that Lamont had indeed offered the tainted bars, and said that the box had probably been mixed up in the store room.

She said that multiple recalled CLIF bars had been sold to students, but that the rest of the stock had been thrown away.

“In theory they had all been removed,” she said, calling the Lamont Library instance an “unfortunate mistake.”

Martin said that students could return the recalled bars to any of HUDS’ retail dining locations, where they would be refunded for purchase price.

David S. Rosenthal, the director of University Health Services, said he was “surprised and disappointed” that HUDS had missed some of the recalled items.

“People need to be cautious about eating peanut products at the present time,” he said.

According to Rosenthal, UHS has not yet seen any cases of salmonella poisoning attributed to peanut butter.

Harvard first saw the effects of the salmonella outbreak in mid-January, when vending machines had to be restocked after the recall of Austin brand peanut butter crackers.

Martin said that residential dining has been “impacted very little” by the salmonella outbreak since the peanut butter available in dining halls was not implicated in the outbreak.

—Staff writer Liyun Jin can be reached at ljin@fas.harvard.edu.