Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Matt Regusci: Something could have triggered this dude and he could have felt like he was laid off when he shouldn't have been or fired or something that he didn't do. And he dwelled on it and dwelled on it from May to August, and then he was just like, one day, just damn it, I'm done. And then decides to hack into this system and jack with their stuff.

Francine L Shaw: So everybody commits their first criminal offense. I just wanna point that.

Matt Regusci: Just because this guy may be 50 in his first offense, or you know what, this could be the first time he got caught.

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. Join industry veterans, Francine l Shaw and Matt Regu for a deep food safety. It all down to golden rule. Don't eat poop. Don't eat [00:01:00] poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello. Hello Francine. How are you today? I am wonderful. I'm ODing on caffeine right now. Oh. If you haven't heard our decaf coffee episode that we did a few weeks ago, you should go listen to that one 'cause it's, I think it's probably on the top, top of our funniest list.

So you're, you've cut back on caffeine?

No, not at all. I am so tired. I would woke up at four o'clock yesterday. Three 30 this morning and I normally wake up early. I normally wake up around five o'clock in the morning. And both yesterday and today I set my alarm clock to wake up 'cause I have so much work to do. And I actually woke up before my alarm clock went off both times.

So that was very nice for my wife 'cause nobody wants a exhausted wife. And yeah, so I didn't want to piss her off. But yeah, so. Yeah, no, I'm streamlining coffee and I don't usually [00:02:00] drink energy drinks, but the last two days I've had to drink energy drinks. You're the Monster, right? That's what you drink is Monster.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. So yes. I think my daughter and my daughter-in-law found this stuff that is, is really good. I don't can't remember the name of it, but it comes in a variety of flavors. It's actually an energy drink that's marketed to women. I. And they grew very quickly and they were just sold, I can't remember the name of it.

Matt Regusci: Is it, it's more beneficial to women? It, what are the... or it just marketed to women.

Francine L Shaw: Branding. Branding.

Matt Regusci: So they're just trying to go after that niche that owns consumer spending in the largest consumer spending country in the world. That makes sense.

Yeah. It's, yeah. Alani.

You've moved to that instead of Monsters? No. You have your Monster [00:03:00] same color.

Francine L Shaw: I can't find it around here. Actually, I did see it at the Family Dollar, but yeah.

Matt Regusci: You buy in bulk because you, every single episode you have that exact.

Francine L Shaw: This is the thing. I much care as I was. Really not intentionally. I'm just not drinking as much caffeine as I was.

Yeah. It's just I'm such a routine kind of person.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Yes you are.

Francine L Shaw: I really am. Yes you are. It's so ridiculous.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. So many people like that listen to this show, like you and Francine are so much alike. Yes. And no. Yeah, no, I am not a routine person. I routinely wake up at the same time and I routinely drink the same I, uh, caffeine some days more, some days less. But that's about it for me.

It depends [00:04:00] on what we're talking about. Yeah. It depends what we're talking about.

Now, it's interesting 'cause you and I both work in the food compliance world, right? So the vast majority of the people in this world are very organized.

They have to be very routine oriented. They know their stuff, right? Mm-hmm. And so my teams have always been those type of people, which is awesome. Because I've been blessed to hire amazing people and work with amazing people that are very organized when decisions need to be made or whatever they come to me and we talk it through, and I'm able to help them really quickly, and then they go off.

And then when things go to hell, it works really good too because they're like, what do we do, Matt? And I'm like no problem, This is a good problem to have. We just do. Okay, good.

Francine L Shaw: That's the key. We hire great people. Yeah. We surround ourselves with [00:05:00] good people. We are also fixers. We know how to fix problems.

We are the people that make the decisions and we know how to fix problems. That's what we do. We fix problems.

Matt Regusci: We also are good at finding problems.

Francine L Shaw: We're very good at finding problems and helping what the problems are and telling them and helping them fix those problems.

Matt Regusci: Okay, so speaking of hiring, well, the topic today is a company that didn't do so well in hiring.

And so the topic today, 'cause Francine and I have talked about this a lot on our show, a lot about food fraud, about terrorism, food terrorism, and. That's what we're gonna be talking about today because a poultry company in South Carolina just had a plant sabotage case and food safety gaps because of this plant sabotage.

And a guy is looking like he's gonna be going to [00:06:00] prison and fine because of this. And we, Francine and I saw this article on food safety news and we were like, oh, we definitely have to talk about this because this could happen in any food plant across the world this can happen to.

And we had this conversation. We did a webinar for NEMIS, a global webinar for NEMIS. And this, we actually sent this watch out because with what's going on with the immigration and with the tariffs and all that stuff, there's gonna be people who are gonna be ticked off and. Possibility for food terrorism is going to increase significantly.

I'm not sure why this guy did what he did.

Francine L Shaw: Companies need to start watching out for this type of behavior because it's going to happen. You know, it. It's just a matter of time till this type of behavior starts to happen. It's on the forefront and it's not just manufacturing and processing restaurants as well.

It across the board through defense. You [00:07:00] need to be on your toes 'cause it's gonna happen. People are angry and frustrated and it's gonna happen and you need to prepare yourselves and put systems in place to prevent these things from happening.

Matt Regusci: Yes, and we're gonna put the article down below in the notes.

We'll make sure to send this to the editors, but it's on Food Safety News is where we saw it. And it, the title is South Carolina Chicken Plant Sabotage Case Exposes Food Safety Gaps.

Okay, so I'm gonna read a little bit of this. Just give it a little bit of premise because it's not like it happened yesterday.

This actually happened in August, 2023. A South Carolina Poultry processing facility faced a potential crisis. When a former employee allegedly manipulated its chemical cleaning system, raising questions about cybersecurity and insider threats to the food supply chain. The guy's name is William Jason Taylor, a [00:08:00] 51-year-old South Carolina resident.

Pleaded not guilty on April 30th this year in Columbia, South Carolina federal courtroom to charges of unauthorized computer access. So he was doing this through the computer and that's interesting. This is where the cybersecurity thing comes from.

Francine L Shaw: A computer he didn't belong at.

Matt Regusci: A computer he didn't belong at.

Francine L Shaw: He shouldn't have even been there.

Matt Regusci: Exactly. And this is where the whole entire JBS remember this, when they were hacked by Russian hackers, they assume it was Russian hackers during Covid. And it basically shut down a third of our meat supply because JBS supplies like 30% of our meat in the United States, and they're a Brazilian company, but 30% of our meat here in the US and they weren't gonna pay these people, which I understand. I wouldn't wanna pay them either, and so their whole entire system shut down and a meat packing plant.

Anybody who hasn't been to a meat packing plant, it [00:09:00] is completely automated. Yes, there are people throughout the line. There's a lot of people on in the these plans like that episode we did, which is also a funny episode where we were talking about Darin Detwiler's article about upping the chicken rate of 145 per second to 175 per second. Like that matters. Those things are not being hand cranked. There's not a person cranking a wheel? No. It's all computer automated to go that fast. These chickens are flying.

Francine L Shaw: We're talking about getting slapped in the head with a piece of chicken. Imagine our carcass of beef slapping you.

Matt Regusci: Oh man. Oh man.

Yeah, it's finally, Biden had to say to the JBS peeps, dude, just pay the damn fine. We'll help you with it because we need to get meat going, right? Not fine. Let's call it a stupid tax, right? Being hacked by Russian. Go pay the stupid tax. Let's get this meat processing back up at the right [00:10:00] speeds instead of human speeds. Let's get this going at computer automated speeds.

So anyways, this dude wasn't supposed to be where he was and so William Jason Taylor. Prosecutors alleged that he a former technician at a cleaning service company referred to as company C in court documents illegally accessed the chemical dosing system.

Of the Sumter based poultry plant referred to as company P. So we don't know who these companies are, which is probably good 'cause they don't want us saying this over our podcast. He did this over six days. So this crap had been happening for almost a week, right? In August, 2023, according to the court documents, Taylor altered the levels of peracetic acid and sodium hydroxide chemicals.

Critical for sanitizing poultry, but hazardous if mishandled while [00:11:00] disabling safety alarms and redirecting notification emails to mask his actions. That's a lot of steps. This guy really thought that stuff through, like who is like, okay, so if I do this, it's going to enact this, and so all these safety features that were there to make sure that this doesn't happen.

He disabled those safety features. This guy, it's 100% if he gets prosecuted for this, it is definitely premeditated. It wasn't like he went on there and accidentally bumped the wrong button.

Francine L Shaw: He did, and that wasn't his background. He had to research how to do that.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Or he learned it from the company that he was with.

Yeah. He had to have tried to figure, how did he get the codes for this? There are so many questions after reading this article in my head, which is what you and I are talking about, where we like figure out problems like how in the hell did this guy do this anyways.

Francine L Shaw: The acting access, he had to get the [00:12:00] codes.

He had to know exactly which switches and what buttons to push. He had to, I mean, there's a thought process.

Matt Regusci: Okay. I love this writer, Jonan Pilot, I think is how you pronounce the name. Pilet... Pilet? It ends with a T. It could be French I, I could be butchering this guy's name. But anyways, he's a great writer for Food Safety News.

I love his titles. The next one is A Disgruntled Insider Access. I love that. It's a great title. Sums up this next paragraph. Taylor's role at company C, which provides cleaning services across South Carolina and Georgia, involved designing and maintaining chemical dosing systems, giving him intimate knowledge of the poultry plant's operations.

His employment ended in May, 2023 and company C required him to surrender his email alarm codes and other credentials per court documents cited by the state. Yet [00:13:00] prosecutors alleged that Taylor exploited residual or regained access to manipulate the plant systems. Ex- employees with technical expertise can pose significant risks if security protocols fail.

Some details, including how Taylor regained access remains undisclosed. Of course, because it can help watch anybody else figuring this out. But if you're like one of these guys and you're listening to this show, you could probably think of 14 different ways of doing this, right?

Francine L Shaw: So if a company terminates somebody and they don't go back and change the access codes.

Matt Regusci: And I hate that. I hate it. Everybody and their mother has to know that changing codes is so painful. The only people who like changing codes are IT people and, and IS people. And I think it's because they're a little bit sadistic, but, but they read all this crap and they know [00:14:00] what's going on in their world and it makes sense. You gotta do it. I hate it. 'cause I remember what that code is. Or what people do is they take a sticky note and they write the new code down and they stick it on their computer. That's great security right there. I've never done that before. Never. Francine. Never ever have I have, I written down the password to something and stuck it onto my laptop ever.

Francine L Shaw: And nobody uses the same password for 90% of what they have.

Matt Regusci: My wife and I create passwords that, so that our kids don't know what those passwords are, and they find out what those passwords are and then they start using the same damn passwords for their stuff. I'm like, no, guys. Not only.

Francine L Shaw: I know some of your passwords and they're freaking bizarre passwords. I've ever.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Oh gosh. I know it's terrible. I'm like, here friends, see, yeah. Here's access to this account, and it's the same password I used [00:15:00] for 90%. Yeah.

Okay. So moving forward, 'cause this there is, so I was like to frame, we, we rarely do, we actually read a whole entire article. It's really.

We read 'em before we talk, though.

That's true. That's true. We read it and then we summarize it. But this article is so good. Bill Marler, I don't know how much you pay your writers, but they may need to get paid really well 'cause they are really good. They are really good. Mm-hmm.

There's a couple of them.

The mechanism of Taylor's access, whether through un revoked credentials or external hacking, remains unclear as assistant US Attorney Wilson Holiday declined to elaborate citing that the, it's the investigation according to a report in the Post and Courier.

So it's still under investigation, but of course they're, they're not gonna say this, poultry plant's not gonna say, oh yeah, it's the same password that we had for 14 years. Whoops. No, the guy totally hacked it.[00:16:00]

Okay, so Taylor's attorney, what this is in the mail. So Taylor's attorney emphasizes his client's clean, criminal record and current role as a project manager with no access to sensitive systems. According to the state released on a $25,000 unsecured bond, Taylor awaits further proceeding with no trial dates set as of May 1st.

Okay. So. Sure this guy could have had no criminal background before. I totally agree with that, but that doesn't mean that something didn't trigger him. I have kids in my house. They, they can get triggered easily, but they live with us because something triggered their parents to do something crazy and no criminal records in the past.

But one day dad goes crazy and things happen, right? So something [00:17:00] could have triggered this dude. He could have felt like he was laid off when he shouldn't have been or fired or something that he didn't do. And he dwelled on it and dwelled on it from May to August, and then he was just like, one day, just damn it, I'm done.

And then decides to hack into his system and jack with their stuff.

Francine L Shaw: So everybody commits their first criminal offense. I just wanna point that.

Matt Regusci: Just because this guy may be 50 in his first offense, or you know what, this could be the first time he got caught.

Well, there's that.

Oh my gosh. Okay, so chemical risks and poultry processing.

So the chemicals at the center of the allegations, peracetic acid and ammonia, sodium hydroxide are standard in the poultry processing, but demand, precise control. Yeah, that stuff is really good at what it does, but also really good at taking skin off. It's very caustic. Very [00:18:00] caustic.

Francine L Shaw: Unless it's cooking that chicken to 165 degrees Fahrenheit is not gonna do anything for it.

Matt Regusci: No, but you know what? Maybe you don't have to. This could have just.

Francine L Shaw: It's going to take that Salmonella because we don't have to worry about... the Salmonella's gonna be there. We aren't gonna do anything about getting rid of it. That's been like.

Matt Regusci: This could've permeated the whole chicken.

Francine L Shaw: We are so in trouble with this podcast.

Matt Regusci: 100% we are. How we can take something like this and joke about it. But it, I mean it was really serious and so... Oh my gosh. So, the sanitizer can contaminate food or harm workers if overused, while sodium hydroxide, a caustic cleaning agent poses similar risk in incorrect doses according to the USDA.

Francine L Shaw: I mean, I guess he's trying to leave the door open there.

He doesn't want any liability. If it is misused, it will.

Matt Regusci: I love the [00:19:00] government though. The government, it's so funny. Some they'll like. They'll like go off on the smallest thing and be like, no, you shall, you, shall, you, shall, you shall. And then on things like this, it's, it can, it may. Torture to Bill Marler.

So here's the things that can happen with it. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention also warns that mishandling such chemicals can lead to health hazards. Yes. From skin burns to respiratory issues. I don't know, like burning the inside of your lungs. They don't go into detail that they leave that up to us to put some editorial spin on this. You could smoke two packs of cigarettes for 30 years or take a big whiff of this.

Okay, so Taylor alleged alleged alterations to the flow rates and solution levels could have disrupted these safeguards. Through authorized, though [00:20:00] authorities have not confirmed the actual harm.

Yeah. 'cause it was done years ago. But yeah, they're not gonna, for liability issues, they're not gonna confirm anything and plus who knows how long it's gonna take for something to happen, right? This could have affected people's respiratory issues. Like people could have a respiratory issues that think, oh my gosh, I have allergies, or a cold or something like that.

And then 10 years later they end up having cancer or something. So very fun. Okay, so this poultry producer produces millions of pounds of chicken annually at a rate of what? 175 carcasses a minute. Yeah. So a single incident of chemical tampering could raise consumers concerns. Yeah, no kidding.

So cybersecurity. So there's a little bit of a blurb and Bill Marler's writers do this every single time. So every single article, if it's about listeria, they have a blurb about what list, what are the harms of listeria, because a lot of this is both read by people in the industry, but also a lot of consumers read this.

And so there's little bird put [00:21:00] Cybersecurity, a growing threat to food safety. This case exposes a blind spot in food safety, the vulnerability of digitized processing systems to insider attacks. Poultry plants increasingly rely on remote systems for chemical dosing, monitored by the internet connected platforms.

While efficient, these systems are susceptible to sabotage, especially by former employees with lingering access. No kidding. Oh, and then, yeah, this is why I thought of the JBS thing is 'cause I read this article like there's times so like in 2021, JBS's ransomware attack, which disrupted the meat processing nationwide highlights external cyber threats.

But Taylor's case reveals the equally pressing dangers of internal sabotage. Yes.

Francine L Shaw: So while we laughed throughout this whole podcast and joked about it, it's a real thing and it's serious [00:22:00] and. It happens. Yes. And the likelihood of it happening more now is there?

Matt Regusci: This is done by a 50, 51-year-old, so I'm the oldest of the millennials and we're starting to get into management positions or whatever.

This is done by a Gen Xer and Okay.

And baby boomers, the Gen

Xer could do this. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of competent older people when it comes to technology. Francine, you're one of them. You teach me how to do crap on the computer. I'm like, oh my gosh, how do you know how to, for instance, I wouldn't believe that.

Right? I like, oh gosh. Francine, like the conference that we spoke at one end of last year or middle of last year, there was a thing on AI and food safety, and I was really intrigued. I was like, oh my gosh, we could use AI and food safety. And Francina is like, Matt, I've been using AI for a while. Like what?[00:23:00]

Yes. So there's a risk because it's a risk for a lot of reasons, but if a 51-year-old is hacking into the computer at his home, what could a 20 30-year-old do? My kids can hack into things I didn't even know you could hack into. Yeah, like we hacked, we had one of these things like keep our kids from seeing certain things on the internet, not allowing them to go certain places, and it was.

Pretty rigorous. And so there were things that they wanted to get onto. I not like, I'm sure possibly other things, but like going to a website and seeing an article about somebody who died locally or whatever, it would block them from that 'cause it was violent or whatever. They all knew our passwords.

They just hacked into it like, oh my God, this isn't gonna work. Okay, whatever. Yeah. So if this is going to be a bigger issue, more and more. It's one more thing [00:24:00] that the food safety community is gonna have to worry about is you may think your sadistic IT person is just being mean to you, but you try to keep this crap from it happening.

Francine L Shaw: Sometimes the IT people all speak IT and it's sometimes hard to communicate with them because they all speak IT and you really need to listen to what they're telling you because it's it, it's dangerous.

Matt Regusci: Yes. Now, yes. The last company I worked with was a software company and we had to get SAP certified.

Oh my gosh. A major company that we were working with was like, your security is harder to deal with than ours. This is like one of the largest food companies in the nation, and they're like, why is your security so complicated? And I'm like, yeah, I completely agree with you. But yeah, this is the future. [00:25:00]

Francine L Shaw: So I worked for a company and when I would go into their distribution center, like I had to take my laptop in and it literally would lock down the internet in my, like I couldn't access the internet on my laptop and they would have to come in and do something to my laptop so I could access their internet, so I could do what I needed to do while I was there.

It was crazy. This was a national brand. It was insane. I was working with their people while I was there, and I needed what was to access what was in my computer. But yeah, they would have to come in and do something so that I could access the internet while I was there and I, I was in their distribution center and it didn't matter what distribution center I went into, they would have to come in [00:26:00] and do something so that I could access the internet.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Their IT people were like. Okay, fine. We will let you.

Francine L Shaw: She's here again.

She's there again. And I couldn't literally do anything until they came in and it was pretty, and that's after I got into the building.

Matt Regusci: This is something that should be added to risk assessments for food safety because. This is a real problem 'cause everything is automated. Even like reading a pH and stuff like that.

Some companies are, they automate that like it's no longer just a guy, you know, going in and testing it with strips, they can, they, a lot of companies have equipment that can test all that stuff. So free chlorine, all that different type of stuff. It's all being done. But that can all be hacked if you're like in fresh produce and you have a dunk tank.

And that dunk tank [00:27:00] is being automatically fed a certain amount of chlorine, making sure that the pH is correct, making sure that there's enough free chlorine, all that type of type of stuff, and that gets hacked. You could create a pathogenic soup really easy.

Francine L Shaw: So we're talking primarily right now about manufacturing and processing, but food can be contaminated at any point in the system.

Right now, we probably have a lot of truck drivers that are up that. Because of things that have recently been implemented. It could happen during the transportation point. Yeah, it could happen there. It could happen in the retail setting. It, it can happen anywhere. The contamination at the food and it has over the years happened at various points.

Matt Regusci: And it does. So early on in my career, this is 20 years, 20 something years ago. 20 something years ago, one of my clients. I'm not even gonna name any of the things or even what the commodity is 'cause I don't wanna give people ideas. But a retailer [00:28:00] connected with one of my clients and was like, Hey, your berries had needles in them and we think it came from you.

And they're like, oh, what That happened? And so they traced it back to the lot they found the crew, they started asking about it and nobody knew anything. They're like happy with their work. They, this company treated people very well. Employees, people think that like field workers don't make that much money.

These guys made a lot of money for picking up that, that product. And so they were all happy. No, it wasn't us. It happened again with a different brands berries. And then they were like, what is going on? Come to find out because they had to do the corrective action process and let these companies know, because they were trying to, they were gonna recall all of this product, and so they stopped the recall and were like, no, it was this dude in the produce section that was ticked off about something and he was just putting needles in the product.

I'm like, what? That is a whole nother, nother level of [00:29:00] evil. Golly.

Francine L Shaw: Over the years telling like dozens of stories about restaurants and grocery stores and transportation that it's happened. So it's not, while manufacturing and processing hits a wider range, a broader spectrum, because they're sending their products to a lot of different places.

Whereas when you're in a retail setting, and that covers restaurants as well, it only hits one unit. So it's not many people, and so the news doesn't typically, that doesn't hit national news unless somebody dies. You know what I mean? Not as big a deal is made out of that. That kind of stuff happens as well.

Matt Regusci: You and I have had this conversation with a lot of people about this too. We could all think of dozens of different ways of terrorizing. [00:30:00] Using the food chain to terrorize, that would not be that complicated. So if we could think of it, there's a lot of other people can too. So this is a real risk. This is a real risk.

Francine L Shaw: Well, and companies should have food defense plans. Yes. Whether manufacturing, processing or retail, it doesn't matter. You should have defense plans. Yeah. And I used to teach food defense and you assume that they all do, but it's something that this country really hasn't had to deal a lot with. And there's a lot of companies out there that do have food defense programs.

Matt Regusci: And very good food defense programs like employees that are the manager of food defense.

Francine L Shaw: Right. A lot of companies do, but there are also a lot that don't. Mm-hmm. There are many that don't because it's not a problem until it is a problem. And I'm gonna give you a really good example when you walk through the airport. Or you walk through a major Darin Detwiler sometimes posts pictures. He's walking down the [00:31:00] street and all their products are sitting out along the on the street.

Yeah. Just been delivered that regularly. Well, many people have access to that stuff that's sitting out. That's not just a time and temperature use issue. A lot of people that are going by hand access to those products.

Matt Regusci: Yes.

Francine L Shaw: And anything can happen to them while they're sitting there.

Matt Regusci: The cyber attack stuff that is, I think it's just gonna grow if your goal is to harm a lot of people, or I think there's two different things.

One is harm a lot of people and the other one is harm the organization. And it could be you wanna do both. I think this guy really just wanted to do harm on the organization. That's the fastest way. If you have a hundred seventy seven, a hundred seventy five chickens flying through and you jack something up on the computer that puts peracetic acid and sodium hydroxide all over these things, just [00:32:00] flying through and spreading it all over the place.

That's just one way he could have, if he had, he could have done like 14 more things probably in this that could have been bad. Oh man. That's crazy.

Alright, well. I think that we thoroughly freaked out our audience today, Francine.

Hey, please sleep well. Have a great week.

Francine L Shaw: Wonder what we just did to the poultry industry.

Hopefully nothing.

Matt Regusci: Nothing that they don't do themselves, that's for sure.

Yeah, well, there's that.

All right, all. Don't eat poop.