Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

DEP E115
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[00:00:00]

Steve Ardagh: The guy said the worst thing is my staff have been in this for eight hours a day and I thought they were safe 'cause they're FDA Food Compliant. Mm-hmm. And I said, it's worse than that. That particular brand is used by 25% of food handlers in the States. And they don't know this 'cause no one checks in that industry.

Cannabis is much more regulated than the food industry in terms of that sort of thing. So that's the worry is people just don't know. And you know, we could go on and on about that and vinyl gloves and the phthalates and all these things as well, but it's just, it's really just getting people aware. And as we've talked about before, one of the things we're always telling people is bad news, and we're trying to turn it around as this isn't bad news.

What the good news is that we'll take care of all that for you.

intro: Everybody's gotta eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil into shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. [00:01:00]

Join industry veterans, Francine l Shaw and Matt Regu for a deep dive into food safety. It alls down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop.

Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello? Hello, Francine.

Francine L Shaw: Hey, Matt.

Matt Regusci: And hello. Hello, Steve. How are you guys? Very well. We're really excited to have you again on our show.

Everybody who's listened to our show over the last month has heard that Steve from Eagle Protect has become our sponsor, which is awesome because we were talking about his gloves for over a year people. And all the issues with gloves that this guy brought up that we didn't even know existed.

Well, those of you who haven't heard your interviews in the past. I think we've interviewed you twice before. Yeah. But definitely wanted to interview again now that you become our sponsor, but also because the world is changing, Steve. As Francine and I have talked before, and so most of the gloves are not [00:02:00] manufactured in the United States.

I think most people know that. And so what's happening geopolitically with gloves? and then what contaminants are there in vinyl gloves and that type of stuff, which you're like the reign man of. But before we start that, you wanna introduce yourself to those who've never heard from you before.

Steve Ardagh: Yep. I'm sure there's many who have ever heard as much as I talk about gloves, but not everyone's favorite subjects yet.

It will be, it's the goal. But, um, I'm Steve Ardagh, I'm founder, and CEO of Eagle Protect, and we started in New Zealand in 2006. And we supply around 80% of the New Zealand primary food sector companies with gloves and other PPE. So that's primary food, is seafood, dairy, beef, lamb, a lot of which ends up in the US, particularly the beef and lamb.

And then in 2016, we decided that we needed to save the world at one glove at a time and the place where most gloves are used in the world is the US. [00:03:00] So we moved the family across to Northern California eventually, once we found somewhere to live in and have been active ever since. Trying to make a difference and get people to focus on what is a zone one food safety item that's often just invisible in their minds.

Francine L Shaw: So what is your biggest challenge in doing that?

Steve Ardagh: I often say to our sales guys that it's not a yes or a no that's the problem, it's a yawn. And what that means is people just don't even think about gloves. It's not a criticism it's, or anything, it's just... I don't know how many people we've gone to see and told our story, which we'll get into in a bit.

And I've said, I've never thought about that. And that's the, that is our challenge. But when we do get people to think about it, I understand. And we have, one of the things we're really proud of is we've got a 95% plus customer retention rate since we've been in the US. So once we get people to listen to our story and use our products, which we think are very good, and they tend to stay on, which is great.

Matt Regusci: So it's not a yes or a no, but it's a [00:04:00] yawn. Yeah. It's so funny 'cause when we first heard about you.

Steve Ardagh: Did you yawn?

Matt Regusci: Francine and... No. But we're nerds.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah, that's right.

Matt Regusci: Luckily, most of our audience are too. But when we first heard about the issues with gloves, it never even dawned on us just how bad some of these gloves are.

Francine L Shaw: So the glove themselves didn't, but when I was training, I had this whole barehand contact and glove exercise that I did during the personal hygiene section.

Steve Ardagh: Mm-hmm.

Francine L Shaw: And it was like this very demonstrative thing that I did with the gloves showing how dirty they could get when using that. So I was instantly very fascinated by the whole concept that my God, they actually come in dirty.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, yeah. You're worried about how dirty they get while in use, but you're thinking they're sanitized. I did too. I thought they were sanitized when they came out. I didn't realize that [00:05:00] there's so much crap on these things.

Steve Ardagh: One of the common complaints that people have is that gloves give people a false sense of security.

And it's true. They put a glove on and then they can do anything they like 'cause they've got a glove on and that just doesn't work. That's all about process and training. The big thing is...

If it goes way back to FDA food compliance. So when a procurement person wants to order gloves, someone will tell 'em you need to have gloves that are FDA food compliant.

And so he ticks that box and thinks that's covered it, but what FDA food compliance was always meant to do. So it's not a criticism of the FDA, this check for chemical content and migration and that's all it does. So it makes sure that chemicals in the gloves don't go into the food or that the chemicals in the gloves are safe.

Now, we also know that never gets checked, so we know there's problems with that, but that's another discussion. Gloves aren't required to be clean or intact, so you could have a glove come in with a dead mouse in it and holes all through it, and as long as it passes that FDA food [00:06:00] compliance, there's nothing illegal being done. And so that's the first thing people don't understand.

We are relying on suppliers like us and the factories mostly in Southeast Asia to produce a good product that meets the standards that we think we're after, that we think we're already getting. And so we have just... when we first got to the US we looked at all this and thought we'll develop our own standard because that standard's not good enough for our customers.

So we teamed up with some microbiologists and we did all these studies over the years and five or six years where we tested 2,800 gloves, 26 different brands, some medical, some food. All from Southeast Asia, obviously, and we'd found over 50% of the gloves had indicators of fecal matter on them. We found things like Listeria, Bacillus cereus, Aspergillus, Staph, Strep, you name it.

There's various things on the gloves, and these were viable pathogens. They're not just dead cells, actually viable. Grew out. We did GCMS on them to see what the chemicals in their gloves were and got a lot of surprises there. [00:07:00] And then there was a paper published last year in the Journal of Food Protection on this.

Which outlines the results and explains it in detail. Very comprehensive, um, study. And so we lot test our gloves when they come into the country using these various standards to make sure they're safe. We're not saying they're sterile. That's a totally different thing. They're sanitary. And just to end that, this some section is.

FDA food compliance does not comply with FDA good manufacturing practice. So FDA good manufacturing practice whose gloves should be cleaned, sanitary and intact. FDA food compliance doesn't say that. So there's this gap we're trying to show people that if they actually want to have gloves that are FDA compliant to good manufacturing practice, they need to do more than the FDA food compliance.

So that's where we come in. We do that verification for them because if their auditor see us and we'd love their auditor to say, this are your gloves, clean, sanitary, and intact? Generally, they can't answer that [00:08:00] unless they're buying our gloves or they do their own testing. So that's the big part is complying with that good manufacturing practice, but particularly, and also on ready to eat foods which don't necessarily have that FDA GMP. If you are handling a burger or a piece of lettuce or a bun, you don't wanna be the last thing that goes on the that bun before you hand it to your customer as a dirty glove.

You know, it just makes common sense. You wouldn't cut it with the dirty knife, so why would you ha, you know, handle it with the dirty glove?

Matt Regusci: Absolutely, and people are washing their hands because this is proper GMPs. You wash your hands. And you throw a glove on and some have practices where you do sanitization, but sanitizer isn't going to get rid of any chemicals that are on that product.

In fact, might actually express it more depending upon if it's able to be brought out by alcohol. So yeah, it's fascinating.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah.

Well, it's not in, the chemical ones are classic because we've got a case study that's public that was published in several [00:09:00] magazines and a cannabis producer, Korea Farms was using a glove.

They had a recall initiated by the local authorities 'cause they found a carcinogen on their cannabis product. And after a lot of looking around, they tracked it back to their gloves. And that glove isn't FDA food compliant. It shouldn't have passed that because no one's checking. We're trusting the factories and the suppliers to bring in the right product.

And I won't name any brands obviously, but the guy said the worst thing is my staff have been around this for eight hours a day and I thought they were safe 'cause their FDA food compliant. Mm-hmm. And I said, it's worse than that. That particular brand is used by 25% of food handlers in the states. And they don't know this 'cause no one checks in that industry.

Cannabis is much more regulated than the food industry in terms of that sort of thing. So that's the worry is people just don't know. And you know, we could go on and on about that and vinyl gloves and phthalates and all these things as well. But it's just, it's really just getting people aware. And as we've talked about [00:10:00] before, one of the things we're always telling people is bad news.

We're trying to turn it around as this isn't bad news. What the good news is that we'll take care of all that for you. We'll verify the gloves are safe and intact, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. We're not trying to give you another job. 'cause food safety people have got enough to do and are gonna get more to do as time goes on with the various things that are happening in the country at the moment, I think in terms of restrictions and things.

So we're trying to take a job away from 'em rather than give them another one.

Matt Regusci: What was the carcinogen that was found on those, on the cannabis from the gloves?

Steve Ardagh: It's abbreviated as OPP and I can give it. Oh, I can, you know, it's sort a name that no one can ever pronounce. That's why they call it OPP. I believe it's on the Californian Prop 65.

Prop 65. Um, and those sort of things. So, but I can get you the full name. Create show notes and that sort of thing if you'd like. But it was just one of those things that popped up and nobody's testing for that anywhere. And so it was just, 'cause it was the cannabis industry, they [00:11:00] test for much more than food generally.

So that was important. It was great to be able to publicize that because Free of Farms, people wanted people to know about it 'cause they've been caught out.

Matt Regusci: Wow, and you were saying that also people are finding phthalates on the gloves as well.

Steve Ardagh: Well, there's vinyl gloves, PVC gloves that are widely used in the US and it's one of the, we stopped selling vinyl gloves six, seven years ago.

'cause once we understood how they're made, what they're made of, and their food safety profile, we just don't see the use of them. But nitrile gloves become much more cost effective. Vinyl gloves. Release agent Orange. Effectively, when they're made and when they're disposed of, they may or may not contain phthalates.

A lot of phalates are illegal now. Yeah. In the US and other countries, but no one's checking. And there was a study done by a group a couple of years ago that found that 14% of phthalate free vinyl gloves coming into the US had phthalates and that they tested. [00:12:00] And so you've got a glove that says it's still act free on the box, but we're trusting a factory again in Southeast Asia to do the right thing.

Francine L Shaw: What would you say to people that say, and I, I'm sure this is said, and I'm sure that it's a thought process because I hear it about multiple other things.

Steve Ardagh: Hmm.

Francine L Shaw: Well, there's not enough on that glove that's gonna make me sick, or there's not enough on that glove that's gonna matter.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah, I mean it's, we get that a lot.

'cause we say, well, we found Listeria on gloves and those sort of things. Was it enough to be a problem? And I said, well, any amount of Listeria is a problem, isn't it? If you introduce it into your, you'll do all these things to keep Listeria out of your plant. And then you buy gloves that may have Listeria on them.

It may not be enough to make somebody sick, but if it's enough to hide away in a corner somewhere on your bench and start having a party and reproducing, then you know that's a problem. The other big thing we wonder is, and we've had some false positives on our gloves at labs, and we've got strict procedures now to make sure the labs is using sterile gloves and they test our [00:13:00] gloves because we were getting contamination from the lab gloves onto our gloves has turned out, and so one of the things I wonder is how many, when I read someone's found Listeria on this product and they've done a recall. Then at the bottom it says something like, no illnesses have been reported.

So I instantly think, well, is that actually an outbreak or is the person who tested using contaminated gloves. And so they've done a false positive, and I don't know. My thing is why would you risk it if you have options, or why would you risk it in terms of bringing something into your plant? Same with the chemicals.

Is there enough chemical in a glove to upset people? I don't know. But why would you risk giving your child reproductive problems? Because you are using a vinyl gloves when you're handling the burgers and, and we know there's a study done in New York a number of years ago where they found heightened levels of phthalates and, and hamburgers and they blamed some of the package.

Yeah. Which is a good place to blame. The gloves were also had phthalates in them, so [00:14:00] it just, all these things contribute and sort of pile on top of each other and, you know, contribute to not making America healthy again. 'cause we, we look at them, Make America Healthy Again. Um. Thing that's going on at the moment, and you know, it's great to be doing these things with the food, but what's handling the food and how has it been handled, you know, that's what we'd also like to bring into that discussion.

Francine L Shaw: Well, and there's a very fine line between what will make somebody sick and what won't make somebody sick, and it's not the same for everybody. And who's gonna make that decision?

Steve Ardagh: Well, exactly, and the other thing is it's, most of us are relatively healthy, but there's a subset of population that's not, and a terrible story, which I hate telling is there was, aspergillus killed two neonatal babies a decade ago in a hospital in the States, and it was tracked back to the gloves used in the neonatal ward. So they found  aspergillus, which we've found on the gloves in our tests as well. And 'cause they had very low or immunity, these [00:15:00] things will get in. And they literally, the fungus literally ate these babies alive, um, which was terrible. And I have never been able to find what gloves they were and if there was any repercussions for the supplier.

But I, I hope there was, these are the things, we're talking about it, and you guys know better than I do that you hear about someone, 10 people dying that Boar's Head and it's just a number. That's 10 families that have been changed forever, right? Let alone with 60 families that have had sick, maybe permanently sick family members from that as well.

So we've gotta remember, this is actually humans we are talking about. And lives have changed just 'cause they ate the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Matt Regusci: So my wife and I, she talks about that all the time. My wife is a NICU nurse and that bacteria you're talking about, they call it NEC, I can't remember what it's called, like the actual full name of it, but NEC is the acronym for it and it basically, those little babies, they're tinies, like some of these babies she works with the NICU are like a pound.

My [00:16:00] babies, we, my wife and I adopted, call it babies from the NICU 12 years ago, 13 years ago, and 13 years ago, and they were like a pound and a half and the other one was almost two pounds. Teeny tiny and their whole system just hasn't been developed yet because they were born at 25 weeks and a day, and so their immune system isn't fully developed yet, and it literally eats their intestines alive.

They die by their intestines just being eaten alive by that and it's a huge issue. And they're not quite sure where it comes from. Maybe it is the gloves. I know they've formula companies have been blamed before and there's lawsuits about that and all this stuff. But yeah, it's enough where it's a, it's an issue in the NICU.

Steve Ardagh: Well, there's a couple of papers that we've done on that, on that tragedy and you know, they, the typical thing I believe is the, just the air filtration and those sort of things and making sure it doesn't get into the... those [00:17:00] wards. In this case, they found it on the gloves. They didn't know if it came from the packaging of the gloves or the gloves, but it was on the actual gloves when it was tested.

So, and as we said with the food industry, gloves just fly under the radar so much. It's just, it's something that people just think is, the gloves are gloves and it's just always been that way. And so, and our job is, you know, to stop that yawn that we talked about and get people just thinking that this is a zone one food safety item in terms of food. I shudder to think what gloves contribute to hospital infections, and that's an area we haven't even looked at. Again, when you've got staph and strep on gloves, being found on gloves and uh, handling people with open wounds and those sort of things, it just makes you wonder what could be going on.

But that's a whole different ball game I can't even imagine.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, that's They're already am immunocompromised with the  phthalate thing that interested me. We, because I know we were talking about that earlier and we just did a study of fresh produce in our organization, clean Label Project and Ellipse Analytics.

We just did a, a study on this and we found phthalates [00:18:00] on fresh produce sold in the store. And we are like, now we have to figure out where these phthalates are coming from, right? Because theoretically, you shouldn't have phthalates on fresh produce in a grocery store because it's not in packaging, right?

We just think of phthalates coming from packaging, BPA, phthalates, that type of stuff. We are gonna go test the bags and test the actual plastic bags in the grocery store and then test putting produce in the paper bags, putting produce in the reusable bags. We're gonna put chicken in there first, and then we're gonna put produce in there and then test it.

But then after our conversation, I was like, how prevalent is vinyl gloves used in the produce industry? And it's big, like it's really used a lot. I didn't realize that. And so that should be something we're looking at too. The problem is we don't know if those organizations were using the gloves beforehand, but if we tested those plastic bags that people put the produce in, that we put the produce in 'cause we just did.

'cause everybody does. And we're not finding the phthalates [00:19:00] from the actual plastic bags. Which makes me think, I'm actually thinking of my study that I'm gonna do next while talking to you guys simultaneously. I think I may just buy a box of cereal, just dump the cereal in there, and then test if there's phthalates in the cereal from using the bag or something like that.

Something maybe a wet product. And see, because if there's phthalates already on that produce and we put it in the plastic bag, we can't rule out the plastic bag.

Francine L Shaw: So you're talking about those real thin, clear plastic bags?

Matt Regusci: Yeah, exactly. That's what, that was our hypothesis, but it might not be true. It could be the gloves.

Steve Ardagh: There's all sorts of things. And one of the things that's pretty prevalent, although it's changing now is that supermarkets tend to use vinyl gloves and they have for years and years 'cause they're basically the cheapest. And it's just, it's not... again, I'm not blaming supermarkets 'cause they go to the supplier and say, I want a glove, what's good?

And they say, well here's the cheapest, take that industry. And that's [00:20:00] why some of them don't like us very much. Our industry is complicit in this. We've done nothing over the years to help our customers get a better product. We just give them a glove. And we've gotta remember this is a zone one food safety item, as I keep saying.

So is it fit for purpose? Is it doing what we say it should do? You know, vinyl gloves for many reasons isn't, and they should be banneded and from food handling for everything, frankly, banned from...

Matt Regusci: Well, you were saying beforehand, Steve, that most countries, right, most developed countries do not use vinyl gloves in food?

Steve Ardagh: Japan banned them in 2001 for food handling because of phthalate risk and that sort of thing. Most of Europe don't use them for food handling. Even some states in the US have banned. Maine, I believe, has got a ban against phthalates. Not specifically gloves, but phthalates, that sort. And one of the things that, that I'd love to see is someone track the phthalate contamination back to the glove and then back to the supplier and, and they get legal liability because that would help stop things.

I mean, they, they could [00:21:00] be contaminated with phthalates. As we know from this other study, 14% of phthalate-free gloves have phthalates in them. They could have BPA, they could have PFAS depending on the manufacturer. They have a linear molecular structure, so as soon as somebody puts a glove on, there's this a paper put out by Ansell in Europe

a decade or more ago that showed that 50% of vinyl gloves after donning have leaks in them. So they can have pathogens moved both ways. But you've got an employee, he's got a bit of norovirus and he doesn't wash his hands properly. He comes out, puts his glove on hands use and cut ham. Now you've got norovirus and it's not just the one way or the other.

And so it's just, is this a safe zone one food safety item? And in our opinion vinyl gloves just aren't.

Francine L Shaw: Is there a risk to the user with vinyl gloves?

Steve Ardagh: The study done years and years ago about, were nurses who wore these gloves all day. And so vinyl gloves years ago were used to medical. They hardly used medical now at all, if at all.

Maybe [00:22:00] in some aged care for washing, washing patients, but, but they did the study and they found higher levels of phthalates in the nurse's blood. They decided it wasn't enough to be a problem. But you know, again, to me, I don't want extra phthalates in my blood whether it's a problem or not. So I don't know what the problem level is.

Wow. But, um, so that these are scientific studies done on the poor performance of vinyl gloves, mostly in those days in the medical industry. There's no reason to use 'em.

They're cheap for sure. Having said that, now with the current things going on with tariffs. 90% of vinyl gloves are made in China and 90% of the world's vinyl gloves are used in the US. So there's gonna be... that will change things.

I think there's some other options that a lot of people have available, like TPE gloves, which are like a, a ramped up polyethylene glove. Really good for fast service handling deli meats or burgers or burritos or whatever, that sort of thing where you're not using them for a long time, sort of five [00:23:00] minutes or so and are cheap.

And so there are options available and again, the our industry should be presenting these to the users.

Matt Regusci: Wow. Okay. So 90% of vinyl gloves come from China. 90% of those are sold to the United States.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah, that's, these are my calculation, so this isn't an official calculation, but it's pretty easy to work out when you look at the containers coming, not now, but the containers coming into the country when times are relatively normal.

Things are changing. So there's maybe there's a silver lining in there that that will force the industry to move away from vinyl gloves into other options. And so the downside is the other options often come from China as well. But anyway, we can, you know, one step at a time, I guess.

Matt Regusci: Yeah.

So are you seeing a change?

Are you seeing an uptick of interest now that vinyl gloves are becoming more expensive? Because at some point in time that is going to... a per glove basis [00:24:00] they're inexpensive, but your gloves aren't that expensive overall either. So are you seeing that margin then becomes pretty similar to vinyl gloves?

Steve Ardagh: Not quite yet. These tariffs have just come in into the last month or two, so people will have stock in the country. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. These things, so I'm expecting to see, and we've had a lot of inquiry for different options from various people, deal with them. This sounds a little bit, um, probably sounds a little bit bad, are past the vinyl glove discussion.

We are talking with people who have understood that this is a really important item for their industry or their facility, whether it be a supermarket or a food manufacturing. So we are talking to them about better options anyway. We, if they're using vinyl gloves and they don't want to change, we, there's nothing for us to talk about 'cause we don't have vinyl gloves as as an item.

So there's a change in the industry. I mean, to the first time, the listeria guidelines in that came out a couple years ago for ready to eat foods the FDA mentioned gloves specifically for the first [00:25:00] time. Normally they just call 'em utensils 'cause that's what a gloves is called under the FDA.

This time they used and they specified gloves as a source of listeria, as a potential source of listeria in their FDA guidelines. So that's, I don't know if that's us or just general people getting a bit smarter about things, but that's progress to us.

Francine L Shaw: I was just, I was smiling 'cause I was thinking of a new marketing strategy.

Matt Regusci: Don't eat poop. Don't use vinyl gloves.

Steve Ardagh: No, it's just, it's just one of those things that's just not necessary. 'cause there's much better options available. To be fair to, you know, I don't wanna come across as being critical of procurement or food safety people. You guys know the food safety industry better than me, but these people have got so much to do.

They don't need any more problems. Procurement people are designed their job as generally, here's a spreadsheet. Yeah. Bottom line, we need it to be less. And so they're under pressure to reduce costs [00:26:00] always. I mean, that's just the nature of the business.

So the, what we're trying to do is sort of mix that food safety, and when we went into them, they were using vinyl gloves six or seven years ago, and they were using a 4.8 gram per gloves.

I know that's not American language, but 4.8 gram. That's how the gloves have measured in terms of weight. We moved them onto a 2.8 gram nitrile glove that doesn't rip. And they were getting 15 to 20% rips with the vinyls and none with our gloves effectively. And so we are saving them a million pounds of waste every year just by changing their glove 'cause of the amount of gloves they use.

You don't have to fix the whole world one step at a time and to move it from a vinyl glove to a nitrile glove, not, there's no training required. We don't need to go in there and say, here's a new product that you need to understand. It's still a glove that fits better. They love it. Every time I go into these places, I ask, what do you think of your gloves?

And they think I'm nuts that they said, I love them, you know, 'cause they just stay sweetly so I can feel the product because it's much more tactile. [00:27:00] It's nice and thin. I don't have itchy hands. All these good things that you know can be affected by vinyl gloves, by all sorts of gloves, nitrile gloves as well if they're not well made. So it can be a really positive tool of trade.

The last thing, sorry, I won't mention the company name because I don't wanna get a legal letter, but you put a post on LinkedIn a while we while ago about rodents in their facility, Francine and I know what the gloves that company uses and one of the things we always say is the gloves are the canary and the coal mine for food safety.

If you look at the gloves that the front line workers are use, that tells you in, in our minds what the whole food safety culture is like doing right back. Because if you give your frontline workers the cheapest tool of trade, you can possibly get the cheapest tool for them to do their job. So it, anyway, just, it's one of those things that to us, I go into and I, every time I go in, I look at the glove they're using it, I walk out again because I know what that means behind the scenes, behind that [00:28:00] next door, they're cutting corners as well, and in, in our minds.

I can't say that's the case, but it just, to me, it's, they're not taking things seriously if you're not giving your workers the best tool to do their job. Right. And doesn't mean the most expensive. That story I gave where they saved a million pounds of waste, we gave them a much superior product because they were using less of them and productivity was improved.

It was actually cheaper per month. Mightn't have been cheaper per glove, but it was cheaper per month overall. So, and that's, that was proven. That wasn't just me talking. So.

Francine L Shaw: Because they didn't reduce waste because they weren't changing gloves, it's because they weren't tearing them. You know what I mean?

And that's why they. Right.

Steve Ardagh: Ah, yeah, totally. And so depending on the job you're doing, you can wear a glove up to a couple of hours, depending on the glove as well. If you go into a meat plant, meat processing plant, those guys are generally wearing a quite heavy glove for two hours at a time, and that's fine.

Whereas if you're making a burrito, depending on the glove you're [00:29:00] using, that's a two minute job or a five minute job or whatever, it's right. So it's just making sure you've got the right product or the right job and it'll work and you know it works.

Matt Regusci: Shaking produce is the same way. Those, yeah, gloves break all the time.

So this could, and every single time you change the gloves, you should be washing your hands. And so then that minimizes productivity. And there's, it's very interesting.

Francine L Shaw: And, and this is so many other things, it's awareness. Yeah. They're not aware of the risks with gloves. They're not aware that there's another product that could save them money.

For a variety of reasons. They're just, it's lack of awareness and lack of education because there's just not enough information out there. And they're looking at, and I think, I think I posted something about this last week. They're just looking at the bottom dollar, what the price is, and you're not really comparing apples.

It's like apples to oranges and not apples to apples.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah, definitely. And it's just, that's why I say I think our industry could have done better over the last decade in terms [00:30:00] of giving people options. And why are certain options better than another? I mean, skin, you know, skin issues cost the US millions, hundreds of millions probably every year.

'cause people can't work because they get rashes and irritations.

And that's because often because of a poorly made glove that hasn't been, without getting too technical, is this wash tanks in the glove process, six or seven or eight wash tanks and they're designed to wash the gloves, leach out the, the bad chemicals out of the gloves as part of the process. I've been to factories where they've run those empty to save money. And so the gloves aren't getting washed. So you're getting a, you're getting a glove that is full of irritants and toxins and goodness knows what else? 'cause it hadn't been leached out of the, out of the process.

So there's lots of ways, and the worry that I have with tariffs, 'cause that's gonna put the price of gloves up one ways, unscrupulous factories, not ours, I hasted to add, but unscrupulous factories save money. They put 95 gloves in a box of a hundred. They put... out of 95, they put five reject gloves back [00:31:00] in. So straightaway they've saved 10% just by doing that.

Then they'll use cheaper raw materials. They'll put 15 to 25% chalk in the mix just to, as a filler. 'cause that's cheap. It makes the glove feel good, but it's weak. So there's all these sort of things that glove manufacturers can do to make gloves cheaper, especially when pressure's on, like it is potentially now, right with their situation.

Matt Regusci: We just, we had Francine and I had an international webinar that we were on where we said the same thing. Don't believe your COAs anymore because with tariffs, like desperate times cause people to do desperate things and people, suppliers. You've been great forever and ever and ever may end up cutting corners just to survive while those cutting of corners could hurt you, detrimentally.

Steve Ardagh: Food fraud is a big one, and it's glove fraud as well. It's just people that can get greedy or desperate, as you say, to make things work.

Matt Regusci: So what do you [00:32:00] do that's different with your factories that you use? Are you testing these gloves? Are you making sure that the quality is right? Like how are you doing this that other glove manufacturers should be doing as well? And maybe they are, but what are you doing?

Steve Ardagh: Yeah, I should say there's a lot of good glove companies out there selling good gloves. And so we are the only one that actually tests on arrival in the US as far as I'm aware. We lot test all our gloves for these various things, Py-GC-MS to see, make sure the materials are the same as the stock sample, so that gives us a fingerprint so we can check to make sure the ingredients haven't changed. To, to your point, if things get under pressure, they're not getting fillers or changing the ingredients.

We do dermal toxicity, which measures using human and other animal cells to chest for dermal toxicity. So to make sure there's nothing that's gonna injure your skin. Now we do microbial counts, and if we find anything, which we never have, but if we find anything, we then move on to 16S Gene [00:33:00] Sequencing to see what it is, and we do the fit various physical tests: elongation and strength and that sort of thing.

So we do all that testing in the US to make sure that when the glove arrives, it's safe for the eventual user. The factories I've visited probably a hundred factories over the last 20 years and we've chosen a number of factories in Malaysia and Thailand. We haven't used China for gloves for a long time.

Not necessarily 'cause they weren't any good. It was just we found that Malaysia and Thailand, the reason they're good is that rubber trees grow in those countries. And when latex gloves were first starting to make the infrastructure was based around the ies. Now they use. Petrochemical products and still latex, but petrochemical.

So the infrastructures in Malaysia and Thailand, that's why they're good at what they do. And they've been doing it for a long time. We've used the shortest run with the factory, where, where it's probably 13 years we've been using them, and some of them up to 20 years, 17, 18, 20 years. So we know these factories well, we visit them [00:34:00] often.

We have external auditors go in as well as our own internal audit. We borrowed very early on. We're a certified B Corp and we, very early on, we borrowed the Patagonia code of conduct for their factories and adapted it for us and use that, go into their factories and check everything.

Not just the quality of the product, but the way staff are treated, the environmental impact of the factories, all these things. So this is what we do. We don't sell road cones and hard hats and other common brushes or anything, which is fine. People gotta do this. We just do disposable gloves and a little bit of PPE.

And that's, this has been, it's for the food industry and this has been our focus for 20 years. So we just think we are really good at doing that. Always learning though. Always learning.

Matt Regusci: Wow. That's so cool.

Francine L Shaw: You have our vote. I'm... a wild face.

Steve Ardagh: I'm certainly not running for power. I can make sure you of that.

Yeah. No, I mean we just, you know, we. Our goal has always been [00:35:00] just to save or help the US and other eventually global food industry, one globe at a time, just to make people aware. And at the end of the day, they can make a choice and we present them with the information and the potential product. And if they don't think that's important then that's a decision they can make and we move on. There's no, we're not saying everyone must use us. It's just that here's the facts. And it's a risk, I think, without naming names probably, but I think there's been some companies quite recently that have decided that the risk of having a food safety outbreak is less important than money that they're making.

And so they're prepared to take the risk to maybe have a problem and they haven't for 10 or 15 years. And then they do. And it's, it's, and that's the trouble with foodborne illness outbreaks is you don't get a warning. It just happens. It's done right. It's o off again on again.

There's no sort of, oops, we better change. So this is just one way you can reduce your risk in our view by making sure that your [00:36:00] gloves aren't compromising your safety rather than helping it.

Francine L Shaw: It's not a problem till it is a problem.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah, exactly. I mean it's a big problem generally. Yeah. Potentially deadly one.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, that was what I was gonna ask you is our audience, most of 'em are nerds like Francine and I and obviously you Steve, you're like the Rain man of gloves. Definitely the Rain man of gloves. Can you send us the different journal that you posted and a little like just a comment of what that journal references and I'll...

Francine and I will make sure that is in the comments below in the podcast so that they can then go click on the link and then reference it. Because just like what you said, food safety, people want what's best, they wanna minimize risk. Sometimes they get pushback from procurement. Oftentimes they'll get pushback from procurement or operations on cutting the budget.

But if they have proof of, Hey, this is not good then, you know it's document providing risk [00:37:00] assessments and that would be very helpful is to provide that data for the audience.

Steve Ardagh: We have case studies as well that show, which we've talked about here, and show that change into something that on the face that looks a couple of cents more expensive is cheaper in the long run apart from the reduction in risk. But just because you don't waste gloves. Good gloves don't need to rip. And that's the first thing we need to get rid of through to people is that ripping is not an option if it's well made. There's always the odd problem here and there with any product, but generally good gloves don't rip.

And so that's the first thing to get through to people. So right. If you're losing 15% of them from ripping, you change to a good product. That's it's 0% basically.

Francine L Shaw: I like that. Good gloves don't rip.

Steve Ardagh: Good gloves don't rip. I put, as people do these days, I put some stuff through ChatGPT the other day and I came up with this great line that I love.

I'm not sure how to use it. Perhaps I say every glove lot runs through a food safety lie detector. That's what [00:38:00] ChatGPT came up this. I really enjoyed that. Um.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, that's what really got Francine and I was, when we started seeing the studies done and we were like, what is going on? This is crazy. We were totally ignorant of this.

And we had Dr. Darin Detwiler on an episode, I think it was National Glove Day. Is that right, Francine? This was last year. Yep. And he was talking about it, and it's just, you don't know what you don't know. We say that all the time on our shows. You don't know what you don't know, but this is, it's frightening.

Steve Ardagh: That's exactly what you're saying. You dunno what you don't know, but the assumption is that the regulations that are there are giving you some protection. But if you read into the FDA food compliance, it was never designed to say that gloves are clean or intact. It was always designed around chemical content and migration.

And so the clean and intact part as is the user talking to their supplier saying, we require sanitary gloves. We're not asking sterile 'cause it's a whole different [00:39:00] ball game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They should be sanitary.

Francine L Shaw: It really is bizarre. 'cause we talk about hands and hand washing, but the gloves are an extension of our hands.

Steve Ardagh: Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: And we don't talk about the gloves.

Steve Ardagh: There was a good study done several years ago, which we did a paper on. Which I haven't got in front of me, but it showed that 16% of foodborne illness outbreaks in the US, and this was U in the US This was using CDC and FDA data. 16% implicate gloves in the cause. What this study done by the CDC, I think on a number of restaurants, and I can again give this to you and put it in your notes, the glove hand implication was around 30% of foodborne outbreaks was associated with gloves or implicated gloves and hands, and it's hand washing.

It's, Hey, if you don't wash your hands properly, then you've got dirty hands and you put on your gloves. You just contaminate it. There's all these sort of things, let alone having pre contaminated gloves. So there's all these sort of things that process and sourcing of gloves that [00:40:00] contributes to that stat.

These are things, again, that we just want to raise awareness, and then if companies can make their own decisions based on what their priorities are at the end of the day.

Francine L Shaw: I'll have to, if you have that, send it to me, please.

Steve Ardagh: Yep, definitely. I will.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. You would've loved my training. Excitement. I'm telling you.

I was good.

Matt Regusci: You're still good, Francine. Yeah, you're still good. You just, oh my gosh. Every single time we talk to you, we learn something new and we've talked to you so much. That's crazy.

Steve Ardagh: I appreciate you inviting me back. I've often said, and I've said to you on many occasions, I only get invited to parties once because people ask what I do and I ramble on about this and it's like I change their lives forever.

'cause the next time they go into a takeaway, a fast food outlet, they start, well I saw what gloves are they good to, I get a text. So these guys are using a blue glove. Is that the right? So it's, it's just, but it's highlighting what [00:41:00] goes on and you got you. I'm sure, Francine. I've listened to some of your stories of inspections you've done, and I'm sure you've seen a lot of interesting stuff.

And we see the, you know, I'm looking through the glove lens and I have seen some what people do with gloves and how they use them and how they shouldn't use them. It's just frightening.

Francine L Shaw: I, I'll never forget one time I was doing an inspection and it was an executive chef and he had on, and I'm not kidding you, five pairs of gloves and I'm like, whatcha doing?

He's like, well, the sink is way over there. And I'm like, you've still gotta go wash your hands. He's like, I don't have time. I'm like, you don't have time not to. You need to take those off and go wash your hands. I mean.

Steve Ardagh: I've had the same experience actually with someone in a, in a butchery department wearing six gloves. So three pairs of gloves on each hand.

And I said, what are you doing that for? And they were vinyl gloves. And he said, 'cause they rip all the time. So when one rips, I take it off and I've still got a good [00:42:00] glove underneath. And I said, what happens with the last glove? You've got this beautiful salty glove juice, pre-salting the steak that you are cutting up full of, God knows what.

And he sort of looks at me like I'm, and I, you know, you can understand these guys are, they've got things to do. They've got performance targets to me. They've gotta get stuff done. And the last thing they need to do every five minutes is walk over to the sink, wash their hands, dry their hands, try and get another pair of gloves on.

And, and so poor quality leads to poor proceeds at the same time. It's just, if you've got poor quality, it'll, it means people take shortcuts.

Francine L Shaw: So, and I wanna make myself clear, this was five pair on one hand, five gloves on one hand. So he had 10 gloves and if he is in charge, what are the employees doing? Are they washing their hands or not?

Steve Ardagh: And imagine what... When he gets to that last glove, what does that glove juices what...

Matt Regusci: at that, not that. Was he using the restroom and just taking that glove off? Is he like, I got [00:43:00] extra. I got, I'm good. I'll just take that one off. I'm good.

Francine L Shaw: Like, so you know what my facial expressions are like.

Steve Ardagh: It's not a good look. I mean, that's the worries. That's the mixed thing. And checking his phone and goodness knows what else.

But anyway, I guess,

Francine L Shaw: Yeah, I'd like to tell you that was the only time I ever saw that.

Matt Regusci: Well, Steve, as always, it's uh, enlightening and interesting conversation. I'm pretty sure a bunch of people from listening to this episode are gonna be being like, ah, shoot. One more thing I gotta do.

Steve Ardagh: Well, we have a solution. We've been working with some good people for a solution, which is a Harp C document that people can use around gloves and put it into their folder and helps them, just puts in a number of steps that they can use to make sure they're getting as good a product as possible, you know, without making it too onerous or a big job.

And so while we're highlighting the problem, we're trying to find [00:44:00] solutions that work for these guys as well. 'cause we know everyone's far too busy and that's don't need more problems soon. And we're at the Food Safety Summit in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure when this is coming out, but, so we'll have that document then.

Very cool.

Francine L Shaw: We came to them with a solution to fix the problem.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Alright, well Steve, don't eat poop.