Owner: Bay Shore meat recall was precautionary

The owner of a Bay Shore meat processing plant said Wednesday that no beef from an E. coli-contaminated batch this week ever left the plant or reached a consumer - but was instead caught by standard safety procedures.

The routine procedures at W.B. Stockyard, of Saxon Road in Bay Shore, resulted in the meat being detected soon after it arrived from a Colorado slaughterhouse, the owner, John King of Holtsville-based J. Kings Food Service Professionals Inc., said. W.B. Stockyard is part of J. Kings.

The boxed cuts of beef remained in their packages while routine E. coli tests were conducted, and were was tossed into a trash compactor after the results came back positive on Monday, he said.

"It was never processed. It never got to market," King said. "There was no harm to the public, and no chance of any harm to the public."

Then, as an extra, voluntary step, W.B. Stockyard immediately recalled all recent beef shipments containing meat from the same Colorado supplier. By 3 p.m. Tuesday all the uncontaminated ground beef had been collected and discarded, he said.

These recent beef shipments had also arrived as boxed beef cuts, and had passed E. coli tests before being processed into ground beef, King said. He said the ground meat only went "to institutions." He said he did not have immediate access to a list of those institutions, or the name of the Colorado supplier, and his staff on Wednesday did not respond to later requests for the names.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service did not respond to a request for information from its Long Island inspectors. But a USDA beef and cattle expert in Washington, D.C., said W.B. Stockyard's response exceeded federal safety requirements.

"You really can't do much more than that. It's being conservative. It was a quick response," the USDA's Kenneth Mathews said. Companies are not required to make the kind of voluntary recall W.D. Stockyard made; and if there's no recall, there's no public notice, he said. Mathews said he could not immediately supply further information on the W.B. Stockyard recall or the Colorado supplier.