ConAgra Halts Processing at Mill To Check for Bioengineered Corn
SCOTT KILMAN / Wall Street Journal 17oct00

ConAgra Foods Inc., one of the nation's biggest packaged-foods companies, said it has temporarily stopped operations at a Kansas mill it fears might have received the same type of genetically modified corn that sparked a nationwide recall of some taco-shell brands.

The corn, called Starlink, isn't approved for human consumption because regulators aren't sure it isn't a potential food allergen.

The Omaha company's only corn mill is located in Atchison, Kansas. The mill stopped processing corn on Wednesday and won't start shipping product again until the company finishes cleaning out the facility and testing its inventory, ConAgra spokeswoman Karen Savinski said.

Ms. Savinski declined to explain why company officials think the mill might have been contaminated with Starlink corn. "We're doing this as a precautionary measure," she said. Ms. Savinski didn't disclose the names of products that contain corn flour from the Atchison mill.

The ConAgra facility is the second U.S. mill to have its operations disrupted by the Starlink debacle. As previously reported, Azteca Milling's facility in Plainview, Texas, stopped processing and shipping yellow corn flour in late September.

Taco shells made from Azteca corn flour for Kraft Foods Inc., a unit of Philip Morris Cos., tested positive for Starlink, a genetically modified corn regulators have only approved for feeding cattle and making ethanol fuel.

The Azteca mill also supplied ingredients to a sister company, Mission Foods Corp., Irving, Texas, which used the flour to make taco shells for several supermarkets to sell under their private labels. Azteca and Mission Foods are U.S. units of Gruma SA, Mexico's biggest corn miller.

Safeway Inc., Pleasanton, Calif., the nation's biggest supermarket chain, last week voluntarily recalled its house brand of taco shells made by Mission Foods. Likewise, Food Lion Inc. of Salisbury, N.C., and Shaw's Supermarkets Inc. of West Bridgewater, Mass., announced Monday that they, too, are pulling their private-label taco shells from store shelves because the products were made by Mission Foods.

Starlink corn, invented by French pharmaceutical concern Aventis SA, is designed to resist a certain insect. Regulators suspect that some of U.S. farmers who grew the corn ignored pledges to keep their grain out of the food system.

Aventis has stopped selling the seed and is trying to buy up the crop now being harvested across the U.S. Starlink is grown on less than 1% of the nation's cornfields, but those 315,000 acres are scattered throughout the Farm Belt, making almost any corn mill vulnerable to accidentally receiving a shipment of the bioengineered corn, which looks exactly like conventional corn.

Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and Cargill Inc., two of the nation's biggest corn processors, said Monday their mills are using new testing kits to scan corn being bought from farmers.

A spokesman for Archer-Daniels, Decatur, Ill., said during the past week the company has rejected a handful of the hundreds of loads of corn it has screened for Starlink.

Both companies said the operations of their corn mills haven't been disrupted.