Johnson & Johnson sales plunge after string of recalls

TRENTON, N.J. – Sales of Johnson & Johnson pain relievers are collapsing as a string of recalls appears to have made consumers wary of once-sterling brands such as Tylenol and Motrin.

An eighth recall, announced Thursday, could worsen consumer reaction. That wariness and the huge amount of products pulled off store shelves together look to be costing J&J tens of millions of dollars a month.

Thursday’s recall by Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil consumer health care unit covers 21 lots of products, including Children’s Tylenol. Those were recalled because of a musty or moldy smell, extending a January recall tied to a chemical on shipping pallets.

The company said the new lots were added to the recall “as a precautionary measure” after an internal review found some packaging materials used in the lots had been shipped and stored on the same type of wooden pallets tied to the earlier recall lots.

An April 30 recall of more than 130 million bottles of children’s and infants’ liquid medicines involved products J&J said “may not meet required quality standards,” may contain tiny metal particles or may have too much active ingredient.

The string of recalls is an embarrassment for a company that set the standard on how to do it correctly when it rushed to pull bottles of Tylenol – deliberately poisoned by someone who was never caught – off store shelves in the early 1980s.

This time, the culprit appears to be a lack of internal quality control. That’s harder to forgive, particularly given that the public has little tolerance for mistakes or carelessness involving products for children, said analyst Steve Brozak of WBB Securities.

“This is pain by a thousand cuts,” Brozak said.

Erik Gordon, a professor and analyst at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said J&J has been too conservative about replacing the employees responsible.

“Heads should have rolled,” and longtime CEO Bill Weldon should be taking responsibility, Gordon said.

Weldon has turned the gold standard for handling an unsafe product “into the tin standard,” he added.

Data from market research firm SymphonyIRI Group show sales of J&J’s pain reliever pills fell 56 percent in the four weeks ending June 13, compared to a year earlier.