Jarred Peanut Butter Punished

The tomato business lost about $500 million last year after the Food and Drug Administration mistakenly fingered it as the source of the last big salmonella outbreak. It turned out that Mexican peppers were to blame. The tomato business still hasn't completely recovered.

Recalls of food products tend to strike unintended victims. This time, makers of jarred peanut butter may be suffering the most. Volume sales of the best-known brands—Skippy (made by Unilever), Peter Pan (ConAgra), and Jif (J.M. Smucker)—have fallen by 24 percent in the month since it became known that peanut butter from Peanut Corp. of America was tainted with salmonella.

Peanut butter that comes in jars you buy at the supermarket is safe to eat. Understandably, such distinctions mean little to consumers, who see headlines about tainted peanut butter and just avoid all of it.

To counteract this problem, the companies that make jarred peanut butter have mounted marketing campaigns. ConAgra is offering 50-cents-off coupons in dozens of newspapers. Smucker is offering a buck off. The Web sites of all three peanut butter brands immediately pop up messages letting consumers know that the products are not tainted.

But "brand expert" Robert Passikoff told USA Today that the companies should do more. He didn't say exactly what, and USA Today apparently didn't ask him.

Michelle Leder, who pores over financial filings for her site footnoted.org, notes that neither ConAgra nor Smucker has filed anything with the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the salmonella scare. When it comes to their filings, the companies have been "strangely silent" on the issue, she wrote.

Companies generally file 8-K forms whenever something happens—the departure of a CEO, for example—that could materially affect operations.

Leder writes that "given the high-profile nature of the problem—not to mention ConAgra's experience two years ago with its own salmonella peanut butter problems—one would think it might warrant a brief 8-K."