Seattle’s Fsa Admits Selling Tainted Food Guilty Plea By Meat, Poultry Wholesaler Results In $400,000 Fine, $600,000 Food Bank Donation

Food Services of America, a Seattle-based food wholesaler, pleaded guilty Friday to offering tainted meat and poultry for sale and agreed to pay $1 million in fines and restitution, the U.S. attorney said.

FSA was charged in federal court with one count of offering to sell bad meat and one count of offering to sell bad poultry, said Kate Pflaummer, U.S. attorney for Western Washington.

Magistrate Judge John Weinberg ordered FSA to pay $400,000 in fines. In addition, the company must also donate $600,000 worth of food to Food Lifeline of Seattle, which operates food banks in the Puget Sound area. The company cannot derive any tax benefits from the donations, the judge said.

FSA’s Kent plant distributes food - including meat and poultry - to restaurants and food retailers.

It had been FSA’s practice for 10 years, up to March 1995, to issue a credit memo and take products back to the Kent warehouse if customers were dissatisfied, Pflaummer said.

From there, the returned products, including those that were “contaminated, off-color or otherwise unwholesome,” were offered for sale to A & B Food Market Inc. of Tacoma at 10 to 20 cents a pound, Pflaummer said.

Records provided by the two companies, as well as reports and inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, show that FSA sold almost 7,000 pounds of meat and poultry to A & B between 1994 and 1995.

Some the meat was contaminated with “dirt, wood, unidentified foreign objects,” Pflaummer said.

A & B pleaded guilty June 5 to one count of transporting adulterated meat in commerce and one count of transporting adulterated poultry. It was not immediately clear late Friday what A & B did with the products.

Sentencing for A & B has been scheduled for Aug. 25.