Marketing & Selling: Tuna Back in Favor

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MARKETING & SELLING

The report from Detroit went almost unnoticed last week, but it marked the end of a painful episode for a $277 million U.S. industry. In an out-of-court settlement, the A. & P. and the Washington Packing Corp., a small San Francisco cannery, agreed to pay $226,500 to the families of two Detroit women who died from botulism in March after eating a bad can of A. & P. tuna packed by Washington. After months of watching its sales dive because of the botulism scare, the tuna industry is now convinced that it has reinstated tuna as the housewives' steady standby.

Because of the botulism deaths—the first in 45 years of tuna packing—tuna sales fell 35%, the industry laid off workers, and some plants had to shut down. Instead of panicking, tunamen formed a "Tuna Emergency Committee," launched a $10 million advertising campaign designed to restore public confidence, and cut wholesale prices to encourage merchants to push tuna in special sales. Related food industries—in celery, mayonnaise, mushroom soup—came to the rescue by featuring tuna prominently in their own ads. The U.S. Agriculture and Interior departments had their agents appear on TV and radio to plug tuna, played up tuna in food bulletins, and even sent "tuna telegrams" to wholesalers and retailers.

Thanks to these efforts—and the taste loyalties of U.S. consumers—tuna sales are now running at the same pace as last year, though it has taken so long to recover from the scare that 1963 sales will be less than 1962's prebotulism record of 17 million cases. No one has ever revealed where Washington Packing's processing went wrong. But the plant remains shut, and though only a few cans were ever infected with botulism, all of Washington Packing's stock was confiscated by the Government and summarily buried—in a well-publicized move—beneath ten tons of garbage in a dump next to San Francisco's Candlestick Park.