Conroy's

The Advertiser: Please don't ruin us, Conroy's pleads :

"The brothers, who, with their father Robert, spent 50 years building the business into a household name, said the recall alone would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The crisis came at the worst possible time for the business - the peak Christmas period."

The listeria outbreak at the factory could not have been worse timed for everyone. For Conroy's it means the loss of the Christmas sales, it also means the loss of hospital saless because of the impact there, it means we have to go hunting our cold cuts down which are traditional fare for us at this time of the year...and it means employees have no work at present. Our orange juice factory was in similar trouble, as was Garibaldis. I should hope that South Australians would remember that Conroys is a household name as is Nippy's. It is all very horrible. The news made it quite clear that Conroy's has rigorous health checks to submit to here and that it has its own very high standards of health and hygiene...but it only takes one careless person to put everyone else's cleanliness and purification at risk. Something obviously went wrong in a short space of time because they had had external health checks just before this outbreak. The timing is the absolute pits but it will motivate people to be doubly vigilant at this time of the year because for some reason we seem to be prone to it especially at change of season. Conroy's won't go off my list forever anymore than Nippy's did. Garibaldi was never on it for some reason. I shall just wait for the all clear and hope we have all reminded ourselves again that you can never be too vigilant when it comes to food.