Earlier this week, we reported “a few product recall zingers” that revealed their ugly faces over the past week or so. As a follow-up, here we bring more product recall news — this time of the iconic toy the Easy-Bake Oven — and ways by which manufacturers can conduct an effective and comprehensive product safety recall.

From September 2006 to December 2006 the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced numerous recalls for products because of potential fire and burn, personal injury, choking, lead and carbon monoxide poisoning, and laceration hazards.

Earlier this week, we reported “a few product recall zingers” that revealed their ugly faces over the past week or so:

1) Maytag last week announced its recall of 2.3 million dishwashers due to faulty wiring. The recalled appliances — sold at department stores between July 1997 and June 2001 and sold for between $370 and $800 — are blamed for causing 135 fires and four injuries. The dishwashers were manufactured in the U.S.

2) The day after the Maytag recall announcement, a news report took a look at a recent IKEA recall. The popular furniture maker had to recall some 877,000 glass vases because they can “unexpectedly break, posing as a laceration hazard to consumers.” IKEA said it received 18 reports of vases breaking, resulting in seven reports of injuries.

3) And then there is the recent spat of food recalls: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recalled all spinach in September following an E. coli outbreak; in November, Hershey Canada recalled a number of chocolate bars and baking products — including Hershey bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Oh Henry! bars — because they may be tainted with salmonella; and just last week Whole Foods Market announced it is voluntarily recalling 6,000 jars of a 32,000-jar lot of its 365 Everyday Value Kalamata Olive Tapenade, effective immediately, because the product “may contain glass fragments, which may cause injury if ingested.”

Additional recalled products this year and last include some 18,000 pieces of dollmaker American Girl’s jewelry for real little girls (uncceptably high levels of lead), Black & Decker U.S. Inc. blowers and vacuums (fire hazard), Emerson Electric Co. ceiling fans (falling blades), Square D Co. safety switches (shock and electrocution hazard), Old Williamsburgh Candle Corp. candles (burn and laceration hazard), and GAMO USA Corp. air rifles, which unexpectedly fire. For some of these companies, the product recalls were voluntary.

As an addendum to that post on Monday, here we bring more product recall news — this time of an iconic toy that not only was introduced almost 45 years ago, but has inspired a cookbook from celebrity chefs and won the Toy of the Year Award from Parenting Magazine in 2003 — and the Office of Compliance at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall checklist for manufacturers.

Hasbro, the purveyor of the ages-old Easy-Bake Oven, this week announces the recall of 985,000 of the electric ranges, sold between May 2006 (the year the toy was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, as it happens) and this month, on reports that “children were getting their fingers or hands caught in the product,” including five reports of burns.

The recalled Easy-Bake Oven, manufactured in China, is a purple and pink plastic oven that resembles a kitchen range with four burners on top and a front-loading oven designed for children 8 years and older.

In 2005, 20 children died while playing with toys. Nine deaths were due to choking on the toys, which included six balls, a balloon, a bead from a toy-horse figurine and a toy dart, according to a memo from the CPSC on Oct. 5, 2006.

Not a toy manufacturer? Product injuries and deaths occur in every industry. And whether products are manufactured in the U.S., in China or elsewhere, implementing best practices during a recall will help to ensure consumer safety and company longevity, as IndustryWeek points out this week.

For the recalling company, a lot of it comes down to brand damage caused by aggrieved consumer confidence. For instance, when Sony’s lithium-ion laptop batteries malfunctioned, they did so in the worst possible way: publicly and destructively. The bad ones didn’t simply die, they overheated to the point where they actually set laptops ablaze. Even worse for Sony, a few of the flame-ups were caught on tape and quickly made the Internet rounds. The result was a massive recall that will end up costing the company about $430 million, possibly more if some Japanese PC makers follow through on threats to sue. But the hit to struggling Sony’s reputation as a technology leader is what really stings.

Aside from voluntary recalls, one way that manufacturers can make consumers feel confident about products is to take part in mock recalls.

For the food and consumer packaged goods industries, which are governed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), mock recalls are pretty much a requirement. “The FDA put the Bioterrorism Act into effect about a year ago,” Scot McLeod, senior VP of ERP solution provider CDC Software, tells IndustryWeek. “The Bioterrorism Act mandates that food processors have to be able to conduct traceability in support of things like recalls, and if they can’t and there is an incident, there can be severe penalties imposed.”

In 2002, the FDA mandated 5,000 recalls and made 286 arrests, according to McLeod.

“When I first got here, the mock recalls were taking about 12 to 20 hours,” says Gary Gold, corporate vice president of quality systems at Berner Foods Inc., a private-label manufacturer of premium process cheese sauces, spreads and toppings and beverages. “In the first year we got it down to six hours. We kept fine-tuning it. We laid out the flow and found some problems and we took that information from the floor and started entering it sooner into the system. When we did, we went down to 23 minutes.”

Although Berner hasn’t had a product recall to date, “it has proved to its customers (grocery stores) that if there were a recall, the Afolkey, Ill.-based company could lasso the situation in less than 30 minutes.”

Manufacturers should also take full advantage of the tracking and tracing technology available to them.
“Many companies, although they have the technology available to them, still tend to track and trace in a manual environment,” says Connie Green, ERP product director for PEAK Technologies, a Columbia, Md.-based provider of automated identification and data collection systems. “They tend to manually write down the products that went out the door, instead of using data capture of any type — even bar codes.”

If manufacturers are doing any type of data capture, then they have the capability to capture data relevant for recalls, Green says.

Despite technology, the effectiveness of a recall is low; for consumer products, the effectiveness of a recall is only about 30 percent to 40 percent. With more than 400 product recalls in 2005 representing 67 million units, that’s only 20 million to 27 million recalled units making their way back to manufacturers.

The reasons, according to IndustryWeek: the price of the item, the remedy that’s chosen by the manufacturer (i.e., how simple it is) and the potential of danger.

The Office of Compliance at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has prepared the following recall checklist to help manufacturers conduct an effective and comprehensive product safety recall:

Production

• Identify defect/safety issue
• Stop production
• Isolate inventory to be recalled
• Determine appropriate remedy
• Test replacement/repair
• Repair/Dispose units on hand and units returned under the recall
• Discuss all aspects with compliance staff
• Redesign future production to eliminate hazard
• Change model/serial number for redesigned product
• Where product changes are made to existing products, label so as to distinguish from recalled products