Zheyuan Zhang, #912960794 Due by Mon 02/10/14
Bus 682-07
Memo Assignment 3

1. I believe Odwalla was atin partial fault for the outbreak. Primarily, people draunk the cider- related  products and got ill. One toddler from Denver even died from organout of organic failures due to the beverage. Such public health issue with lethal cases made the company hardly able to absolveabsolves itself from the blame. Moreover, even though there is no evidence showing contamination in the plant, the supplier potentially offereding ground apples with animal feces, and the type of goods clearly violated the picked-from-tree requirement set by Odwalla; this inference bears out the fact that Odwalla hashave not strictly fulfilled its obligations on product controlling and hygiene monitoring, which are basic demands the public can expect from a food manufacturer. Secondly and objectively, the company didn’t pay enough attention to E.coli, which is nearly impossible to thoroughly avoid, and also didn’t exercise pasteurization code since the juice blends were renowned forby their true flavors without any artificial process including pasteurizing. Additionally, both federal and the state regulators haven’t made rigorous rules against it before. Thus, the outbreak was created by several unintentional operational mistakes, and in that measure, it was unjustified for Odwalla to take blame for that fault all by itself.

2. There were two main feasible options for Odwalla after the crisis occurred. The company can either order a product recall publicly which may cause public panic in thea short term, or keep the outbreak a secret from the very beginning and pull those suspect goods off the shelves amid an ongoing internal investigation for later exposure. The second option may seem legal, safe and cost-oriented, but could lead to a severer public crisis once it was disclosed.

3. If I were the top executive in this case, I would contact with authorities and