Snack Attack: Distributor Fights for Salmonella Reimbursement

Today's economy has small business owners struggling to stay afloat. But when a national salmonella outbreak swept New York last January, one Brooklyn snack distributor took an even harder hit.

David Genovese works at his father's snack distribution company - a small, family owned business created in 1977. They supply building lobbies and mom and pop stores across the city with cookies, chips and their own private label snack items. When the peanut salmonella outbreak swept the nation last January, it hit business hard.

"There are three or four products that we buy in particular that we were told to pull off the shelves," said David, "and whatever we had in the stores and whatever we had in inventory... that was the first recall."

He's talking about chocolate peanut butter Zone bars, made by Abbot Nutrition. When the product was recalled the first time around, Dominick's followed the protocol. Then, just one day after receiving a second shipment of brand new Zone bars, the product was recalled again.

"When the FDA contacted us, they told us whatever it was just destroy it," said David. "They said don't worry about anything else. Whatever product you have that has any kind of salmonella outbreak, could have any kind of outbreak just destroy it, and that's what we did.

It took David and his employees almost two months to visit each and every client, and pull potentially tainted peanut butter bars off store shelves. In return, he gave nearly 90 different clients a credit for the product.

"We took the credit off each bill, which we were told to do from a brokerage company," he said. "Maybe a month later or a month and a half later we got a call from Abbot... from one of the representatives at Abbot and they had said, 'You can't do that.'"

According to David, the brokerage company who initiated the reimbursement deal was no longer working with Abbot. As a result, Dominick's says they did not get reimbursed. And that's not all! Abbot refused to send them a new shipment of Zone bars, insisting that Dominick's still owed them money.

That's when David called "Help Me Howard." We managed to get his company a full reimbursement. And since our involvement, Abbot has also processed their new order of Zone bars. As a small business owner in today's economy, David says he's thankful for Abbot's generosity.