My recent story and blog post about the sad plight of unsold rotisserie chickens at Sam’s Club revealed that the St. Louis Park location lacked a blast chiller, a device used to cool down hot chickens in short order. I learned this week that the machine is on the way, and it could start chilling those chickens next month.

So that should make them fit for donation to the hungry, right? Not exactly. It turns out the Sam’s Club folks didn’t quite have their facts straight when I spoke to them about the trashed chickens. The lack of a chiller wasn’t the problem. Susan Koehler, a spokeswoman for Sam’s Club, told me Monday that the chiller will enable to store to repurpose the rotisserie chickens into chicken salad, chicken tortilla soup and the like. But Koehler said that the cooked chickens won’t be part of its expanded donation program with Feeding America.

Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, explained the problem in an email Tuesday:

“Chicken is very prone to quick spoilage, food borne illness and cross contamination. In order to rescue cooked chicken it must be either cooled to below 40 degrees or frozen, and then rushed in a refrigerated or freezer truck to a food pantry or soup kitchen. The organization ‘rescuing’ the chicken must ensure that the food is safely handled and stored every step of the way, from the grocery store to the end recipient. We always err on the side of caution when rescuing food so, for the reasons just detailed, I believe that this is a food item that is very rarely rescued.”

Fraser continued by saying that the new donation program with Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart mean that “when all the stores are up and running we anticipate rescuing between 70 and 100 million pounds of food a year…”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Complaint sagas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.