‘Metal chips in the bologna’: Never-seen-before photos show a look inside the Jarratt Boar’s Head plant

GREENSVILLE COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) — The Jarratt, Virginia Boar’s Head plant that was linked to a listeria outbreak that killed 10 people closed its doors indefinitely in September.

Employees said phones could not be in the workspace, and photos were not allowed to be taken. Now that the plant is closed, a former employee is giving 8News an exclusive look inside the plant — all of which he captured through a Samsung smartwatch.

“I found metal chips in the balogna,” the employee reported, explaining that he believed the metal came from a broken detector meant to alert workers to metal contamination.

This employee wished to remain anonymous, he was hired in September 2020 as a line worker, packaging and shipping ready-to-go meat.

“The liverwurst was probably the worst out of all of them,” he recalled. “We used to check the meat when it comes to any wrapper, to see if it has airbags in the meat, making sure it was wrapped tight. But the liverwurst was so mushy, the bag could never be tight on it.”

Boar’s Head permanently discontinued its liverwurst product when the Jarratt plant shut down.

“Meat would fall on the floor,” the employee said. “People would pick it up and put it back in with the regular meat.”

Despite bringing these issues to management’s attention, he said he felt dismissed.

“I was either ignored, the issues never got reported up the chain as they were supposed to be, or I was told to continue to process things,” he explained. “I know from common sense and training that they were not and should not have been.”

Frustrated with the lack of action, he said he decided to reach out to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) himself for the first time in March of 2023, filing a complaint and sending a detailed letter of things he had seen in the plant.

“They kept running the balogna and shipping it out,” he said. “I feel after these two incidents, with nothing being done and meat being shipped out, I needed to go to a person higher up.”

Following his complaints to the USDA, he received confirmations that his messages were received but never heard anything further. After the announcement of a listeria outbreak linked to Boar’s Head products in July, he reached out to the USDA again, only to be told they had not received any prior complaints.

He believes that if the USDA had taken his complaints seriously, the issues could have been addressed sooner, potentially saving lives. Now, the USDA is internally investigating to see if state employees correctly handled inspections.

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