The reason for mentioning this is that a vendor of a food product could have a shipping document that shows a US point of shipping, in other words, the delivery document that is signed at the time of delivery on “blind” shipments would not indicate to the vendor where the product originated, as well as a purchase order, thus the tracking and delay time in getting this information to the end consumers.
Blind Shipment
A B/L wherein the paying customer has contracted with the carrier that shipper or consignee information is not given.
After all the years I spent in transportation, they need to make it against the law to allow “blind” shipments, happens all the time. If it’s a purse or a shoe as you are not going to eat it, not a big deal, but when you have food products it is. Food products are not always labeled as to where they originated either, just the corporate offices may be listed as the point of origin.
A “blind” shipment is when you have ABC Company in let’s say Chicago, IL that has product made overseas and distributes all over the world. The product may only show Chicago as the address wrapper, label, packing slip, and on a bill of lading, when in fact it could come from many locations. When the bills of lading are created from a warehouse shipping the product, the origin shows Chicago, even though it came from a 3rd party warehouse in Los Angeles for example where it was offloaded from a container from China. Companies do that to hide the outsourced manufacturing agent for branding purposes. That is called a “blind” shipment so by the time you match up an invoice to see where it came from, etc. it can take a few days, just like we are starting to see here.
Transportation companies don’t normally like to do that, but cave in when it means loss of business if others do it. Years ago was not an issue, but not by today’s standards and I can almost bet all of these incidents involved some “blind” bills of lading making it a nightmare to trace. FDA has done their bit on fresh food, but should really clamp down on this as I don’t think we have seen anything near the end of this. Actually there should be no food or drug products shipped without a full label showing complete origins, city, state, country, etc. and no “blind” shipments. Once it has cleared customs and is in a local US warehouse, and the bills of lading show a“ blind” origin instead of let’s say a 3rd party bill when the product ships, we have one big mess. BD
SHANGHAI — More contaminated Chinese candy was discovered in the United States on Wednesday, this time in Connecticut, where consumer protection officials issued a public warning against eating the sticky sweet.
The discovery announced Wednesday involved the White Rabbit Creamy Candy brand, which is sold in 50 countries but has already been recalled from stores in Britain and many Asian countries. Jerry Farrell Jr., Connecticut’s consumer protection commissioner, announced that contaminated candy had been found at two stores in New Haven, one in West Hartford and one in East Haven. In each case, tests found traces of an industrial additive, melamine, in the candy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/world/asia/02milk.html?partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss
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