Nidan-Foods is one of Russia’s largest juice and juice drink producers, releasing the popular Champion, Yes! (Da!), My Family (Moya Semya) and other brands. During the 2004 New Year’s holidays, a resident of the Chelyabinsk Oblast city of Snezhinsk turned to her local Health Inspection Service with a request to identify the contents of a foreign substance that she allegedly found in her My Family juice.
Subsequent tests revealed traces of mercury in the product. An analysis of packages of the same juice taken for testing from local city stores discovered no such contamination. However, information about the case made it into the Chelyabinsk Oblast media. Reporters turned for comment to Nidan-Foods’ press service, which was operated by the agency.
The agency informed the client about the crisis situation. An analysis determined that it was impossible to prevent the spread of information about the case. The agency was set the assignment of urgently developing and implementing a program for minimizing the damage to the enterprise’s reputation, and for restoring trust in the My Family brand.
The agency decided to immediately issue a statement through the media in the company’s name containing the fullest details about the case. These details were accompanied by comments from enterprise management.
The comments indicated that the company completely excluded the possibility of the contamination occurring as a result of any violations, faults in the production cycle, or some other accidents, since mercury was not used by the enterprise in any of its procedures.
It was underscored that the facility manufacturing the juice was the most modern of such plants operating in Russia, and one of the most modern in the world, having been commissioned only six months before the case occurred. The company did not rule out the possibility of premeditated malice at its production facility, and announced the launch of its own investigation aimed at determining whether this might have been the case. The company further expressed a readiness to cooperate with all of the interested parties, providing full access to information about its production practices.
These comments were first distributed to the Chelyabinsk Oblast media, followed by the national news agencies and national media outlets with reporters working in the Urals. The agency accompanied these comments with a special warning to the media concerning the legitimacy of spreading public panic, which might be expressed by the appearance of copycat complaints.
The company launched an immediate independent investigation. But since it required some time to conduct, its results could only be made public two days later. The investigation determined that it was impossible for any foreign substance to contaminate the food since the automated production line did not allow for human contact with the packaging. Moreover, the production line was never stopped during the manufacture of that batch of juice. Samples of that batch, which were stored in a special “taste archive,” contained no contaminants.
The company and agency could thus justify the conclusions of a new statement, which categorically denied the very possibility of a foreign substance somehow making its way into the juice package. The statement concluded that the contamination occurred outside the enterprise’s premises. At the same time, the company asked its distributors to provide a detailed account of the situation from their perspective, and demanded that they tighten control over their shipment and product storage conditions.
The company’s statement was widely distributed across all media outlets. The brand rehabilitation program also included the filming and distribution of a feature about the production facility, which highlighted the strict safety and quality control standards employed by the company. The company’s managers also made a number of media and general public appearances in which they addressed issues concerning the quality of production and the company’s responsibility before consumers. The program also provided for press conferences and press tours of the plant, which were organized for Urals and Tatarstan media representatives.
As the agency had presumed, the subject of mercury’s discovery in the juice made it onto the daily agendas of national media outlets, joining the second dozen of news items according to ratings composed for February 13–15. In this period, the crisis publications covered an audience of about 2.5 million people. However, even during this period, most of the publications also contained the media statement that was duly distributed in the company’s name – these publications covered 94 percent of the involved audience.
The anti-crisis group managed to present the company as being aware of its responsibility before consumers, and of being fully open to further cooperation. A quote from an article published in Company Secret (Sekret Firmy) magazine on February 24, 2004: “According to experts, a timely company response and its full disclosure of information represent efficient methods for handling crisis situations.
This, for example, is what Nidan-Foods did when the media obtained access to information about mercury being discovered in its My Family juice. In the course of a week from the date of the first report about the case, Nidan provided the Health Inspection Service with information about all production of the packaged juice on the same day as the contamination case. It also got in touch with its distributors and asked them to tighten control over their shipment and storage of juice […]
Company management then issued a statement concerning its innocence in the case: a check of the facility showed that its was impossible to introduce a foreign substance into a juice package even if someone wanted to do so, since the production process is fully automated and personal intervention would only be possible if the production line were stopped.
Even though Nidan does not hide the fact that it expects to suffer some losses, the company hopes that its anti-crisis measures will help to reduce these losses to a minimum. ‘Of course, there will be losses,’ says company General Director Andrei Yanovsky. ‘But we expect them to be relatively small because we tried to act quickly, and to be open with our information both before the state authorities and our consumers. I think that we accomplished this task.’” According to company data, sales fell by five percent in the first quarter of 2004, which well within the range of average seasonal fluctuations.
