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Smart managers would run it by equally smart lawyers and regulatory partners, who would patiently and in no uncertain terms explain that compliant operation of
by patio11 7y ago
Smart managers would run it by equally smart lawyers and regulatory partners, who would patiently and in no uncertain terms explain that compliant operation of this business has a playbook, that "college kid with an unrefrigerated uncontrolled uncleaned car" is not part of that playbook, and that the last time a fast food chain needed to announce a food safety issue it wiped off billions of dollars in market cap. (The tippity top of the iceberg here is that the courier can't produce a document attesting to the last time his car was cleaned signed and dated by the person who visually inspected it. Note that this is a different requirement from "You must clean the interior of any vehicle which transports food over state lines.")
It is very plausible that the playbook is excessively limited and excessively costly because of regulatory capture by competitors, because of excessive loss aversion, or because society weights preventing risk-adjusted botulism outbreaks incorrectly against the societal good of an expectant mother being able to eat a donut, but none of those arguments against the playbook are responsive to the brute fact that the playbook exists and that you must follow it or be sanctioned.
Additionally, and Dangerous Professionals will love to remind managers of this: after you have been told the playbook exists, your risk of sanction if you ignore it _increases markedly_, particularly if you do something like cite any of the above rationales as a reason to _ignore_ the playbook.
- eutropia 7y agoI'm sorry, but you're suggesting that botulism would take hold inside a 4-6 hour window on fried, glazed, doughnuts? The risk of foodborne illness on an unopened box of fresh, less than half-day old deep fried sugar crusted doughnuts has got to be stupendously low. Krispy Kreme literally sells older doughnuts on the shelves of gas stations and grocery stores. And furthermore, managers at a Krispy Kreme franchise aren't running an abstract game theoretical calculation based off of input from pastry lawyers, they're saying: "cool, $1200 in sales every Saturday!" When I was in scouts we'd do the same thing: load up the back of the SUV or pickup with boxes, drive street to street, walking door to door selling them to fund summer camp.
- patio11 7y agoI think that there is relatively little weighting to food science here and relatively high weighting towards technocratic administration, which predicts (correctly) that neither Krispy Kreme franchisees nor donut couriers have done a risk assessment and therefore is extremely prescriptive about the paper trail you need to have to exempt you from broadly applicable practices. Grocery stores are an example. They're professionalized infrastructure! The regulator knows their safety record individually, as a class, and feels regulatory-warm-fuzzies over knowing that there is a named individual at the store responsible for food safety and who files a report weekly saying "Story this week same as the last week; we checked everything you want checked and there were no anomalies, because we made it so."
- giarc 7y agoIt's not just food safety, it's also food quality. KK wants to maintain the quality of the food and a donut sitting in a hot car for a few hours before a customer gets it will degrade the quality. They don't want potential customers (they could open a store in that area) to associate their product with a warm, soggy donut.
- adrianN 7y agoGive the student a refrigerated, controlled, cleaned car then and pay for it from your ad budget.
- paulcole 7y agoYep, this is exactly how pizza delivery works. Hate it when my pie doesn’t arrive piping cold in a company car.
- zaarn 7y agoThe playbook applies to what people do after they bought a product? I would think the first-sale doctrine (or sale rights exhaustion) applies; once Krispy Kreme has sold the product to the college kid, they exhaust all rights over him to determine what he does to the donuts. He's not their employee after all and the playbook does not apply. If there is a food safety issue, it will be on that kid, not the donut shop.
- twblalock 7y ago> He's not their employee after all and the playbook does not apply. If there is a food safety issue, it will be on that kid, not the donut shop. Some people would still blame the donut shop.
- zaarn 7y agoAnd the donut shop can do absolutely 0 to stop that. They exhausted their first sale doctrine, they can't stop someone from selling a rotten donut (the law can, not the donut shop).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mattmanser 7y agoThey can force him to stop using their branding, so definitely more than 0.
- zaarn 7y agoNope, they actually can't stop him from selling the donuts with their branding on it (or using the boxes with their branding on it to hold the donuts while selling them). They can stop him advertising using their branding, like on a facebook group, but that's largely the extend of it. The first sale doctrine extends to trademark protections as well, if I buy a thing with a trademark on it, the trademark owner cannot stop me from selling it with that trademark on it.
- LoSboccacc 7y agothe competent manager would then offer the kid training and to loan a refrigerated van branded in company color as an one off goodwill token off from the marketing budget, while having lawyers writing a strongly worded letter to the effect that other following up would have to do with following safety and regulations or be barred from the premises. win win and all that.
- zaroth 7y agoI'm pretty sure that the more active of a hand that the company might take in supporting and promoting the activities of this lad, the less good it becomes for the company if/when something "goes wrong" (for absurdly loose definitions of "wrong", being, the low bar of a filing a civil suit on contingency).
- gambiting 7y agoHow is any part of what you described their problem though? He's buying 100x boxes of doughnuts from them and then that's where their responsibility ends. Just like I don't know, a butchery isn't responsible if the store that sells their product doesn't keep it in a refrigerated display - it's not their problem, they don't send an inspection party to make sure that what left their warehouse is definitely being transported/sold in an approved way.
- bretpiatt 7y agoPizza delivery happens all the time in unclean vehicles, same with DD, GH UE, and all other third party food delivery. My hunch is this has much more to do with franchise laws and boundary enforcement.
- giarc 7y agoI think you are right with the boundary enforcement. Someone probably owns the rights to sell KK in that area, they just haven't built the stores yet. That person is probably in the ear of their KK rep saying "Don't let this kid ruin my territory."
- mindcrime 7y agoHe's probably bolstering their territory, not ruining it. Without The Donut Kid here, those potential KK customers might switch to Dunkin Donuts, or some regional chain, and get addicted to those instead. Now, they're primed and ready for a KK franchise to open up near enough to visit in person!
- mindcrime 7y agoWhat you say may be true, but lawyers don't (generally speaking) run companies. The Smart Managers would certainly consult the lawyers, understand and respect their opinion and evaluation of risks, but remember that lawyers tend to be inherently over-risk-averse, and then still make the right decision. And just to reiterate: I'm not necessarily saying that "turn a blind eye" would have been the right response from KK. I'm just suggesting that it would have been possible to construct a scenario that would have been more favorable to everybody.