Blue Bell trucks ‘on the road again’ with products

Lee along with her grandchildren are thrilled to hear the news. but for her granddaughter Linsey, not seeing the ice cream in stores has been heartbreaking. One store also continues to have an empty freezer with workers saying the owner doesn’t want to serve anything other than Blue Bell.

For those with very short memories, let’s review: As we wrote in our July cover story, “A Sticky Mess”, Blue Bell issued its first recall in 108 years of business in March and followed up with a series of small recalls as efforts to clean the factories and get listeria out of the production line failed repeatedly.

Blue Bell Creameries began shipping ice cream from its facility in Sylacauga, Ala., on Tuesday, more than three months after an outbreak of listeria contamination almost devastated the Southwestern ice cream favorite and forced the closing of all four of its plants. He told WFAA that his customers keep asking about Blue Bell. Although Blue Bell will decide which products will be sold where, the spokeswoman said Houston stores likely would be among the earliest locations to receive the products.

For her seeing the ice cream being pulled, was discouraging.

The Alabama plant is the only one of the company’s plants – two others are in Texas and one is in Oklahoma – that has been reopened and is producing the company’s products.

Listeria is a bacteria that can cause serious illness. “If they were bringing it back, it would only mean that they double checked it and made sure that nothing like that would happen again”, said Jennifer Costello. However, “the key is to control it”, he says.

Or they could market food safety at retail and make microbial test results public.