Menagerie Disguised As Grocery Co-op To Pay Record $1 Million

By Sam Bakken in News on Jun 15, 2005 8:31PM

Yesterday a judge imposed one of the largest food-safety violation fines ever in the Chicago area, and possibly the nation, on Certified Grocers Midwest Inc. for providing refuge for mice, birds and cats at their warehouse in Hodgkins, Ill. Prosecutors were only asking for a $300,000 to $500,000 fine. During a two-week inspection, officials found over 250 mice (one nesting in a noodle box with it's babies), two dozen birds (that shat all over food boxes) and three "very plump" cats. The company stores food for a number of small and mid-sized grocers. You can find a member store near you here.

Before U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman imposed the record $1-million dollar fine he said, "We just assume that food is clean and pure and unadulterated—and when we see something like this, it just destroys that confidence." For us, this quote was Proust's madeleine.

Once as a child, during a family vacation in Northern Minnesota, we refused to eat sweet corn because when we shucked a batch for dinner, we saw bugs crawling on one of the ears. We showed our father and proclaimed that from then on we wouldn't be eating any food that didn't come packaged in plastic. He then let us know that the bowl of cereal we'd eaten for breakfast probably contained more bug parts and mouse feces than 20 ears of good ol' Minnesota sweet corn. At this point, if it were a coming-of-age movie, the camera would have zoomed in on our face (with mouth agape) and a single tear would have tumbled down our cheek—end act two. If you can't trust Tony the Tiger or Toucan Sam to provide clean, bug-and-mouse-feces-free breakfast fare, you can't trust anybody.