Family Meat Business Closes After Single E. coli Incident

Chicago—Dan Kotara's 35 years of grinding meat into hamburger ended last year after a single positive test for a potentially deadly strain of E. coli. Unable to market thousands of pounds of meat, he rented a trash bin and doused the food in black ink to render it unusable.

After losing an estimated $25,000, Kotara decided he could not risk another costly positive result. He laid off the eight employees of his family business, Prange Meats Inc.; sold his equipment; and is selling his Chicago building as well.

USDA never identified the source of the contamination or connected it to a deficiency at his small plant, Kotara said. He could do everything right, yet still lose money because of shoddy practices by a supplier, he said. The case shows how one incident can result in the closing of a business built up over decades, no matter how committed it is to safety and sanitation. By all accounts, Kotara had a good record, without a single positive test for E. coli before last year.

Kotara said he could have absorbed the financial loss, but the chance of another test coming back positive was more uncertainty than he could take.

Read the full story by Steve Mills at Chicago Tribune.