Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Matt Regusci: So here comes Donald Trump, right? And he's not wearing a hat. He's not wearing gloves. He's doing all that. And then there's a bunch of food safety people and not food safety people or food safety people in other ways, but that are like, he should have been wearing gloves. He should have been wearing a hat and, and all that.

And then, Oh, if Trump's on there and now there's an outbreak in McDonald's are, no, there's a difference between causation and cause and effect, right? Yes. He wasn't a McDonald's. No, he was not in a McDonald's. That's part of his outbreak. At all and even so he was at the fryer. It wasn't like he was doing something else

intro: But he's got to eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine L. Shaw and Matt Ragusi for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop.

Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello, hello, Francine.

Francine L Shaw: Hey, Matt. Long time no see, right?

Matt Regusci: Long time no see! Couple days. It's interesting, for as close as we are, and the rapport at which we have, we really haven't spent that much time together face to face.

Francine L Shaw: No, not at all.

Matt Regusci: Not at all. It reminds me of that story that Tia and Jill talk about from, oh my gosh, I'm drawing a blank.

What's their catalyst? So Tia and Jill from Catalyst, they're amazing people. They literally created their company during COVID and they had never met each other in person. Remember that interview when we did that with them? They talked to each other virtually, they'd seen each other virtually, but they had not met face to face when they started their company and started working together.

That's almost like us, like literally you and I met each other and saw each other only a few times. Probably.

Francine L Shaw: We've actually been together in person. Probably. A handful of times, I know, in what, 10 years, something like that.

Matt Regusci: Yes, I've probably a couple handfuls of times. Yes. At this point. Yeah. Like 10 times in person, which is really interesting to think about.

I don't know why I had that revelation all of a sudden, which has nothing to do with the conversation of what we're going to be talking about today. Nothing at all. So Francine, what are we talking about today? We are going to

Francine L Shaw: talk about the Food Safety Consortium.

Matt Regusci: No, that's the next one. Oh, that's next week.

Well, I mean, we might as well talk about it. So next week's episode, we're going to do a, a rundown of the food safety consortium that we were just at. So Frantine and I were at food safety custodian. We have amazing lineup of great interviews that we did there. Rick, shout out to you. Thank you for inviting us again to do podcasts at your conference at Food Safety Custodium.

It was awesome. So yeah, Francine and I for next week's episode, we're going to give a kind of a deep dive of who we talked to, what did we learn, and what is our excitement given this year's Food City Custodium for next year, but that's next week's episode. What are you talking about this week, Francie?

Francine L Shaw: We're going to talk about the hot topic of the week, two weeks. Maybe it's been, I don't know, McDonald's. It's all the rage.

Matt Regusci: It's really been a, kind of a week. Wednesday, I get a phone call from somebody, and I'm sure you're the same way, Francine. Whenever there's an outbreak, Francine and I get phone calls from people asking us if we know anything.

And most of the time, we do. Most of the time, you and I are up on it, I don't know if it was because of food safety consortium and you and I were just out of the loop. Wednesday morning, like 6 o'clock my time, Wednesday morning. I get a phone call asking me about this McDonald's outbreak. And like, do you know anything about it?

I was like, no, there's an outbreak at McDonald's what's going on. And yeah, there's an outbreak going on right now, Matt. And it's in your state. It's like in Colorado. No, what's going on. It's with the quarter pounders. We were still talking waffles. We were totally talking. Why heavens?

Francine L Shaw: And who knew big Macs were a thing.

Yeah. So McDonald's is going through a tough time right now. And it's been a while since we've been talking about E. Coli. Listeria has been the hot topic for the last many months, even before Boar's Head, though Boar's Head was certainly tragic. And as much as I hate to see this, Boar's head is probably happy to see somebody else in the news right now.

But yeah, it has taken the world by storm. Taylor Farms and McDonald's. So one person at this point, as far as I know, only one person. And I say only, I don't mean to minimize one person's death is substantial, but one person has died and how many have gotten sick?

Matt Regusci: It is 10 people have been hospitalized. 49 people across 10 states have been sickened.

Francine L Shaw: And I saw the press release and while they're talking about, well, it was only on these, it's from onions, flavored onions. Allegedly,

Matt Regusci: we have to, we have to think about our language here.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. I need to be careful about our words.

Matt Regusci: Allegedly, the thought is that this McDonald's outbreak is coming from the onions, the little tiny onions in the sandwich.

Yeah, that's what allegedly is happening.

Francine L Shaw: But interestingly, they also pulled ground beef. Patties. I read. Anyway, I was watching a snippet, I guess, maybe from a press conference, and they were talking about the onions, and supposedly they only use this particular product for certain menu items. And the message that they were putting out there for consumers was that as long as you've not consumed these menu items, Basically, you've got nothing to worry about.

Well, that's not entirely

Matt Regusci: true. It's not entirely true. And with the ability on the apps to now add whatever you want, I'm not sure how clear McDonald's or any of these major companies that allow you to add products to a product. Yeah, for those of you who don't know, I'm a big dude. So unfortunately, I know how to order via an app for a lot of fast food chains.

Somebody at the conference said you were like

Francine L Shaw: 6'4

Matt Regusci: right? So when you order in an app, it allows you to then modify The product way easier than if you're talking to somebody. So there's been a lot of upsells, which a lot of times they charge for the modification of the product. And so if you're ordering a product that doesn't have those onions in them, but you want it to add the onions to it, you could just, right.

So while I agree that McDonald's knows exactly what ingredients are going into each product, On an overall, this is the recipe for these sandwiches. People can just add those products as an addition.

Francine L Shaw: They know their product makeup. There's no question that they know the makeup of their menu items, but they've got employees over there that are making their own menu items.

First of all, I've worked in restaurants. We make whatever we want when we're working. We come up with all kinds of creative menu items. And customers do the same. You do. You remember the old, you don't, you're young. The old Burger King commercial that was Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don't upset us.

Matt Regusci: Yes. That. Oh, we did

Francine L Shaw: that. You, yeah. Yeah. So customers do it all the time. They come in and they're like, okay, so I don't want round onions, I want chopped onions. I don't want, they do all kinds of stuff. For a couple different reasons, they think they're going to get a fresher product and they just many reasons they do this.

So you can say that, okay, well, we only put slivered onions on the big Mac. So if you didn't order a big Mac or you didn't order this product or that product, you don't have anything to worry about, but you've got cross contamination issues. Plus you've got the secondhand Darren Dettweiler's son never ate a sandwich in 1993.

So you've got all these other concerns to worry about in addition to the people that ate. The original menu items that the onions may have been on. So, who knows when or where this may stop. The only positive spin on this is E. coli doesn't have the incubation period that Listeria does.

Matt Regusci: Right.

Francine L Shaw: And time span should be shorter than the outbreak for Boar's Head.

If indeed it is from the slivered onions.

Matt Regusci: I do think it's interesting. So a couple of years ago, you remember the Wendy's outbreak and they nailed it down to romaine lettuce. And now we have this outbreak with McDonald's and they're nailing it down to the onions. There's still like with Wendy's, they're pretty sure it was that, but there's no, they were, I don't think they really got conclusive evidence that it was exactly that, but they were pretty sure that was it.

With this, they're still talking back and forth. Was it the onions? Was it not the onions? What I think is interesting is while out of abundance of caution, they may have gotten rid of the meat. I think it's interesting that a couple decades ago, this would have been, oh, it was definitely the hamburger. It was 100 percent the hamburger.

And everybody's thought it would have been the hamburger. Right now, and kudos to the meat industry for changing this around. Now it's, Oh, it has to be the produce. It's got to be the produce. That's the issue. What a shift in a generation that it's gone from the meat is the problem to the meat is no longer the first thought of the problem.

It's the produce has some PR and some issues that they got to fix, but it's different, right? Cause you have a kill step with the meat. You do not have a kill step with the produce. Right now.

Francine L Shaw: Right. And these restaurants are pretty adamant about how they cook their burgers. You can't go into a McDonald's and say, I want a rare burger.

It isn't going to happen. They're not going to give you a rare burger. Policies and procedures that they have in place for cooking those burgers is pretty intense. You might get a burnt one, but the odds of getting a one are pretty slim. I'm not going to say that it never happens. Because there are situations where it certainly does occur, but it's slim.

It's rare for those situations to occur, considering putting into perspective the number of burgers that they cook and serve in the course of a day.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, I agree with you. So, this is interesting too, because this goes down to, the first part is the epidemiology, right? So, 49 people get sick. 10 of them are in the hospital.

The CDC and the FDA work in conjunction to figure out, okay, what did they eat? And where do we link this to? And they have to have pretty conclusive results before they go to a McDonald's, for instance, because McDonald's has very sophisticated people on there. So, um, CDC and FDA really can't go to McDonald's and be like, we think it's you.

They're going to be like, Hey, give us the data and we'll have our team run through this as well. And so they have to be ready for, to provide that data to McDonald's. Once they know it's probably these menu items, because these people said they ate this quarter pounder with cheese from McDonald's, these 49 people.

And from these McDonald's. Then they send it to McDonald's. McDonald's goes, yep, agree. We're going to start recalling this stuff now. And then from there, it's a investigation of what was the ingredient that created the issue within this sandwich. And so they came down to potentially the meat, most likely the onions.

And so when they're looking at the onions, then they got to look at who's my supplier for those onions. And for this, what we have right now on McDonald's side, and we'll have this, the article down below as well from Food Safety News, but on the McDonald's side, they're saying it came from U. S. Foods and most likely a facility that Taylor Farms supplied them from in Colorado.

These onions can run tests, and it could have been just that batch that had a bunch of E. coli in it, and now it's gone. So even if they were to go and To their current onions and run that sample and test the everything that touched those onions before. I've been in these Taylor Farms facilities. Their sanitization routine is amazing.

So if they had a bad batch of E. coli laced onions that went through the facility, the chances of that E. coli being still in that facility, either on the belts, on the machines, or in anything. Is like close to zero. They're not clean. They are sanitized. When I walk through a Taylor farms facility, which I've been through multiple times, it's like a clean room in those things.

They have me in full blown medical type of like, I'm going to go into a surgery room. I have coats. I have all of this PPE that is just insane. And so when Taylor farms comes back and goes, I don't know if it was really us. They may not know if it was them or not. And I don't know if there's going to be any way of proving it was.

I don't know.

Francine L Shaw: So I wonder, I don't know if these onions come in frozen. I'm going to imagine they do. I don't know. I don't know either

Matt Regusci: within this facility. They may probably not. They're probably coming in fresh. And then they're being processed fresh through the facility. Sierra Farms does a lot of stuff, but they're also a fresh cut.

Like they started their company with fresh cut lettuce really with a lot of things. But yeah. Yeah. So it's probably was not frozen onions, but yeah. So when we were going through this and Francine and I were doing our research prior to this, there's a lot of finger pointing going around. Where did this come from?

Who is the issue? Who's default? Yeah. And that's what happens in the beginning is everybody just starts recalling stuff. And then after that, the aftermath is, well, then what happened? And there's going to be a lot of discussion because like the three companies we're talking about that potentially are the issue.

McDonald's, we know they bought that McDonald's U S foods is massive. They're a huge distribution company and they just provide the product, right? So Taylor farms and a whole bunch of other companies. U. S. food buys the product from them, and then they sell it to a bunch of different restaurants. They're a broadliner, they'll sell it to your mom and pop shop, and then they'll also sell it to major corporations, right?

Or they'll also sell it to franchisees, right? So depending upon the contract the franchisee has with the major company, they can either buy product directly from, say, a McDonald's or a Chipotle or whatever, or a Subway, or they might be able to buy on their own. So These franchisees could have had a contract with U.

S. Foods for these onions that U. S. Foods then contracts with Taylor Farms. And so that whole supply chain thing, that's gonna get fuzzy. It's gonna be interesting.

Francine L Shaw: It's already fuzzy. So that's what I was gonna say a while ago. Chipotle, that outbreak they had, and I believe it was 2015. I don't think they ever got to the bottom of that one either.

I don't think they ever really know what caused any of that. Suspicions? But I don't think they discovered beyond a shadow of a doubt what caused those outbreaks.

Matt Regusci: There was a bunch of potentials and one of them was the meat that they used. Maybe it wasn't cooked well enough. Now Chipotle is definitely cooking their meat.

Like, I think they have a process now to make sure that it, uh, is, uh, 100 percent kill step. Someone told me the process, but I'm not quite sure if that was public information, so I'm not going to say what their process is to make sure that it was 100 percent kill step, and also makes their meat still taste amazing.

So yeah, I think they have nailed it down to it was that particular meat source that was the issue. But again, you're right. There was no definitive Francine

Francine L Shaw: now.

Matt Regusci: So

Francine L Shaw: anyway, so, and while we're on the topic of McDonald's, that's

Matt Regusci: the second part of our conversation. Okay. So Francine and I, again, we do not talk politics on our show.

Particularly in the middle of a presidential election, but this is funny and so, but Democrats and Republicans are going crazy about this optics for completely different reasons. Republicans think that the McDonald thing with Trump was hilarious and Democrats are upset because. Obviously, he's poking fun at Kamala.

Regardless, there's been some food safety implications about this Trump thing. And I think that's a funny conversation. So we had to do this conversation just because Francine and I were looking at that going, Oh my God, this is hilarious. All right. So Francine, what has been blowing up on LinkedIn with Donald Trump?

Francine L Shaw: Donald Trump serving fries at McDonald's in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Let's just say I live in Pennsylvania. Yeah.

Matt Regusci: How far are you from there? To two

Francine L Shaw: and a half hours.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, you're like literally two hours away from everywhere.

Francine L Shaw: Right in the center. Which is ideal because I can be anywhere in two and a half hours.

In Pennsylvania. So, yeah, they basically, I posted this yesterday, right? I cropped that picture and posted a LinkedIn post about all of the, uh, Drama that was going on with it about McDonald's stock prices dropping this week about the E. coli outbreak about him serving fries with no gloves and no hat and just all the drama stick to the facts, really?

Yes, he was bagging fries at McDonald's and he did serve fries out the window. Yes, people were eating those fries that he served. Oh, I would totally be

Matt Regusci: eating those fries that he served. Yes.

Francine L Shaw: They did shut down the McDonald's. The general public was not allowed to go in and just wasn't your regular lunch rush.

However, they did pre select people that were allowed to go through the drive through and where he was allowed to serve. So there were real people eating those fries. So it was a total missed opportunity from a safety perspective. But so yes, he should have had had on. He should have followed the same Food safety protocols.

Is anybody else that was working in that restaurant should have had a hat on? Should he have been wearing gloves? 100 percent no. Nobody that works at a fry station ever wears gloves. That oil is anywhere from 350 to 400 degrees. Do you know what happens to your hands if grease splashes on your hands and you're wearing food safety gloves?

That glove is going to become a piece of your skin.

Matt Regusci: Right. A very painful piece of your skin

Francine L Shaw: or those heat lamps. I can't tell you about the burns that I had on my hands from that hot oil. When those cold fries hit that hot oil and that grease splatters the burns that I had on my skin from between the heat lamps and that hot oil.

You're not going to wear those, there's no need to wear those. On the optics of this,

Matt Regusci: first off, Francine's biggest pet peeve, as long as I've known Francine, when anybody in the media or news or marketing provides any content within a restaurant or out in a field or whatever, and they're not wearing the right food safety protective equipment, she hates it.

Okay, I get it. You're trying to get a pretty picture, but you should also get an accurate picture of what your SOPs are within that facility. So here comes Donald Trump, right? And he's not wearing a hat. He's not wearing gloves. He's doing all that. And then there's a bunch of food safety people and not food safety people or food safety people in other ways, but that are like, he should have been wearing gloves.

He should have been wearing a hat and all that. Oh, if Trump's on there and now there's an outbreak in McDonald's, are, no, there's a difference between causation and cause and effect, right? Yes, he was in a McDonald's. No, he was not in a McDonald's. That's part of his outbreak at all. And even so he was at the fryer.

It wasn't like he was doing something else. And so Francine went through on LinkedIn. It was like, Fact. False. Fact. And I love the way you laid that out, Francine. It was awesome.

Francine L Shaw: It has nothing to do with the supply chain. Those onions were already in the supply chain before he got to McDonald's, for God's sake.

Matt Regusci: Nothing. That's so funny. People want to love him or hate him, whatever it is. Well, come on, let's stick to the facts here. What I said was this was a total mis well, somebody else put this on LinkedIn. Was it Sherrod? Who put it on LinkedIn that he should have been wearing his MAGA hat? Isn't he always wearing a hat?

That was, uh, Betsy Craig. Betsy Craig said that's right. Betsy Craig. She's a food. My God. She's so my God. I love her. Why aren't you wearing a hat? You're always wearing your make America great again hat. You should be wearing a red hat. And I thought oh, that is so genius And totally a missed opportunity.

He could have been marketing his like MAGA hat Which obviously everybody knows while simultaneously being correct in food safety and that would have been one less thing people complained about

Francine L Shaw: Again, regardless of how you feel about him, total missed opportunity. He's in there flopping that hair around all over the top of the fry station.

I don't care if it was closed or not. He, he was serving that food. So he was not serving the food. Yes. The food was being served. He should have had a hat on. I don't care what kind of hat it was. He should have had a hat on. That weave was flopping everywhere.

Matt Regusci: Why do I have a feeling that this is going to be our last episode?

We're going to get shut down somehow. We're

Francine L Shaw: not saying anything that's not 100 percent accurate. Again, it's not, it's a food safety fact. No gloves, that's fine. The only problem is you should have a hat on.

Matt Regusci: Do what you want to do. I thought it was interesting. So I saw on the news, I think I saw like a YouTube clip from CNN or something showing this where he like asked the questions.

Francine L Shaw: Oh, so you don't actually touch these with your hands. I'm sure this was a very humbling experience for him. You know what I mean? I'm sure that it was. I read this morning and I'm not sure what publication it was, but he was just totally mesmerized by the Fresco.

Matt Regusci: And that guy, legit, he loves McDonald's. Oh my god,

Francine L Shaw: yes, he absolutely 100 percent loves McDonald's.

I think it said, he said something about, I could really, I'd really love to do this. Let's come back and do this during a real lunch rush. Let me go in. I would love to go in and train him on the fry station during a real lunch rush. I would love that opportunity. You with all 20 of those buttons going off for the apple pies and the chicken sandwiches and the fish fillets and the french fries and the whatever else they're cooking in the fry station these days.

Let Simultaneously and people yelling. I need six of this and I need five of that. You've got four large fries and small fries and me. What are you doing over here? Yeah,

Matt Regusci: he's going to be like, dude, seriously, dealing with Putin is way easier than running the fryer. Where's your hat? Getting shot in the ear.

Way easier than dealing with the fryer. Oh my gosh, when I was managing Starbucks, I bet it was the same for you too. Like, I could only have people working in the drive thru for a certain amount of time, no more than an hour. And it wasn't because of the stress of dealing with the clients and getting everything, it was because of the ding.

So whenever anybody goes into a drive thru, you get a ding in your headphone. It goes like, ding! Ding, ding. And after a while of that, like it was just driving my staff crazy. And so we learned that we had to have people rotate in and out of drive through just for their mental health, just because the constant dinging.

We did it for eight hour shifts. Oh, drive through eight hour shift. With the ding. Oh, man. Wow, man. I had a hard time listening to that

Francine L Shaw: because it builds a tolerance probably explains a lot.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. That's why you have hearing aids from the years. Well, yeah. Yes. So when you started just complete like break when you started at Hardy's when you were like 15 years old, didn't have drive throughs back then.

Oh, God. No. Yeah, so it was just going to the lobby. We didn't have the pry

Francine L Shaw: buttons either. We had a timer that we had to turn on. We didn't have the automatic buttons yet. It was like the big black box with like a timer that you literally had to spin around and push a button. We sold Looney Tunes glasses that year.

That was how long ago it was.

Matt Regusci: Well,

Francine L Shaw: my God, the stories I could tell you about people fighting over. They ran those stupid specials where you had the California reasons and the people, these little stuffed animals like pandas and what were they called? Ducktales. One year it was Ducktales. Oh yeah. Oh my God, people.

We would run out of those. We would start open at six in the morning. I was a shift supervisor. Then we would open it like 6 in the morning and start selling them and we'd be out by 11 and customers fighting over these freaking things, literally fighting. There was 1 time I thought a poor cashier was going to get ripped over by her little tie because we were sold out.

People would get so angry California reasons.

Matt Regusci: We grew up super poor. So we weren't able to really get those happy meals all the time, but I remember friends trying to collect everything in these different happy meals, different toys from the different places. And I remember going, my gosh, you and I, as a kid.

We have, obviously I wasn't thinking like this, but looking back way different priorities and it's like, I don't want to survive and you're trying to figure out what I just hope I don't get my ass kicked walking from school to home or home to school every day based on the neighborhood that I'm living in and you're freaking out because your parents having.

Giving you a hundred new happy meals so that you could get the six things in the set. Wow. Okay.

Francine L Shaw: I'm just hoping there's a Vienna sausage when I get home from school.

Matt Regusci: Right. And you're upset because you didn't get the latest California raisin? Okay, mom too stoned to cook. Am I going to be cooking today when I'm like 10 years old for my four younger brothers and sisters?

Yeah, that's what I was working with.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah, I was walking my brothers and sisters to the grocery store to get groceries when I was like nine and they were five, four, and one,

Matt Regusci: beating

Francine L Shaw: at home before the delivery van. So I could be there when the delivery van got there to get the groceries.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. That was great marketing though, back then.

It was so good that they can't do it anymore. I remember the commercials from McDonald's and from the different fast food joints. And they were marketing to us kids and it was very effective. They can't do that anymore. They don't do it anymore. They don't sell that stuff at all anymore. No, because they got beat up because it was so good.

It basically created a generation of people who absolutely love their products. Like me. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. They were so good. Yeah, I eat fast food. I don't eat it all the time, but I eat fast food. Yeah, growing up, Taco Bell, my stepmom, her family owned five of the Taco Bells in town or in our county. And they went to the same church that we did, the Catholic Church, and they would do fundraisers for the Catholic Church all the time.

And people would give these coupons. It was like, buy one bean burrito, get one for free. And if you bought this raffle at our church. Then on the top of the stub was this buy one get one free from Taco Bell. People at our church would just give these to my parents, to my dad, and to us. So that we would be able to use them like they didn't really care about them, but we would use them all the time.

So I grew up eating Taco Bell all the time. Obviously my dad wasn't married to my stepmom at that time. She married her way after. So one of my favorite things is this double decker taco and Taco Bell has this thing where they cancel everything and then bring it back for a short period of time. So I definitely had Taco Bell yesterday.

Like I bought it. I would say that we get fast food. Once every other week for my kiddos. Wow. Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. And we do not. Now my daughter, when they went to the orthodontist, when they were little, they always, because we live so far away, they always had appointments on the same day. My son and my daughter. And my daughter loves Taco Bell.

Love Taco Bell. My son absolutely hates Taco Bell. He has never liked Taco Bell. So, uh, just to let you know, your son is

Matt Regusci: wrong. Your son is wrong.

Francine L Shaw: I'm sure he'll, he'll hear that. So, I would take my daughter to Taco Bell, and then my son would usually go to either McDonald's or Long John Silver's. Yeah. We would go to different places.

Because he did not like Taco Bell.

Matt Regusci: Which is funny because Long John Silver's for a long time was part of Yum! Brands, which is Taco Bell. So Taco Bell, KFC. Well, they weren't set up that way. Oh, that's true. They're into

Francine L Shaw: it now.

Matt Regusci: So the issue is for my family, when we order fast food is not set up for my family.

No, it's not. It is not set up for my family. Remember when we accidentally, we ordered Popeye's. Was that like

Francine L Shaw: last Christmas or something right around the holidays?

Matt Regusci: Yes, yes. We basically shut down the Popeye's. For some reason, the app doubled our order. And our order was already huge because I have 14 people that live in my house.

So it was massive order with all these kids and then it got doubled. Popeyes hates us. They absolutely hate us. But so when it's dollars for us to order something at mcdonald's, it's not it was

Francine L Shaw: insane It was insane. If I lived closer, I'd come over for dinner. It was crazy. The amount of food was at your house Insane.

So I was talking to Jorge Hernandez from Wendy's when we were at the consortium. We don't eat a lot of fast food. I was telling him there are two places Chick fil a. I love Chick fil a. I could pack up and move into Chick fil a. I love Chick fil a and Wendy's. I love Wendy's fries. Oh yeah. Oh my God.

There's something about Wendy's fries. Well, I think you and I have this conversation.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. We've had this conversation before. I, I think you get. Booked on to a certain product as a kid and then that becomes nostalgia, right? So we're fast food for me. It's McDonald's and Taco Bell are like my two big ones.

Cause that was really what I grew up on. Burger King came in later. I think I was like 12 years old, but a burger came into our town. Carl's jr. Not really jacket, a box. It wasn't until I was in college that I really had a jacket, a box. So it was like McDonald's and talk about. So Chick fil A came later. It wasn't until I moved to Colorado that we had a Chick fil A near us.

And it's, it's interesting cause my kids will go for Chick fil A over anything cause that's their thing. And Chick fil A is like right next to my house and I'm all good with it too because Chick fil A really, truly is the nicest people I've ever worked with. I've done projects for Chick fil A corporate.

They are legit the nicest people. Even when they're not happy with you, they still have a way criticizing you in a nice way. Growing up on in produce with a bunch of farmers, when something goes wrong, I'm used to just getting beat up in the most colorful way you could possibly think of. Chick fil a, no, super, super nice.

So yeah, but my kids absolutely love them.

Francine L Shaw: So neither of those places were around when I was a child.

Matt Regusci: Taco Bell or Wendy's.

Francine L Shaw: Well, no, Wendy's are Chick fil A. Oh, Chick fil A, yeah. Now, McDonald's and Hardee's both were, because when I was like, five? Ish, maybe? I was, lived in Erie, Pennsylvania and I was on the Ronald McDonald TV show.

Boy, would I love to find a clip of that. And I don't know where it would exist, but they had the Ronald McDonald TV show. And I was on that television show. And I remember that vividly. Remember what I wore and Hardee's was like, I can remember not knowing how to say McDonald's by the way. I called it Mc by Donald's for some reason.

I don't know. Hardee's, when my mom would take us to the dentist, we always afterwards would get to go somewhere. And I can remember, I always wanted to go to Hardee's. And ironically, I would be like, hey girl, I want to work here. I'm sure my mother was very proud. When I grow up, this is where I want to work.

And by God, if that did not happen, I've done okay though. I

Matt Regusci: just think you ended up working in fast food and ended up being a whole career for you in a different way. But it was a career for you. By the time you left, that was a career. You had turned. It sure was,

Francine L Shaw: yeah. Yeah.

Matt Regusci: So. Fascinating. All right, we went on a complete and total tangent in the end.

We sure did. We've never done that before. Well, we'll keep you in the loop on what's going on with this one, because I think we're going to get a lot more info with this outbreak. Again, supply chain outbreak. It's not like Neurovirus, it's E. coli. So it was a supply chain issue and we'll find out what's going on and let you all know.

In the meantime.

Francine L Shaw: I was gonna say, maybe we can just do a segment where we wrap up with Boar's Head and waffles and McDonald's and maybe we'll do that again next year.

Matt Regusci: We could have a

Francine L Shaw: whole episode

Matt Regusci: where we just riff on, here's all the outbreaks that we've discussed over the year, where are they in each of them?

Francine L Shaw: And what did we discover?

Matt Regusci: Yeah. What did we learn? I like it. I like it. Well, and E. coli is definitely poop. So. Don't eat poop. Don't eat poop.