9/11 changed the landscape for supply chain concerns. Although we are now eight years downstream, TSA has not promulgated rules in any of the stovepipe industries for chain of custody. Many shippers, because they were concerned about the possibility of adulteration of food by terrorists, enforced internal policies that insist that the seal be intact because if the seals not intact, they don’t know if the product has integrity and all of the damage would come back on the them God forbid terrorists sprinkled ricin in amongst the rice. As a result, they came up with internal security protocols that said if the seal is not intact we’re going to reject the load.

Some of this is under the misguided idea that it’s a federal requirement that there be some seal integrity program – it isn’t. Under the Federal Food & Drug Act there is a requirement that says the product must be destroyed if it is contaminated, or may be contaminated. But when they talk about contamination, they’re talking about things like mice droppings or things were there is obvious external evidence of contamination, not just that the seal is broken.

Cargo theft is one of the biggest and most expensive causes of losses in trucking today. A lot of thieves will pick a lock at a truck stop and when they look in and realize that it’s a shipment of Coke and they’re a Pepsi man, they just shut the door. Well then if Coke wants to trash the whole load because the seal is broken, the poor carrier is left with a $40,000 claim and a lot of perfectly good product is destroyed and in m view, that’s not a reasonable assumption to make.

In the Land O’Lakes case the judge came back and ruled that it wasn’t prima facially reasonable to think that because a lock is picked that the load is contaminated. With respect to that issue, obviously the product in the truck can be inspected. If it hasn’t been rifled through, if it still has 22 skids that are shrink-wrapped and sitting there, there’s no reason to assume the product has been tampered with, particularly when there is three barriers of internal packaging before you reach the actual product. The argument really comes down to what is “reasonable”, but it’s also an issue that transportation officials need to stay involved with because Congress and the FDA are looking at supply chain issues. But you can’t guard against every eventuality or we wouldn’t harvest food, so it is a current issue that bears monitoring by the trucking industry but after the Land O’Lakes case, and there are several other cases still pending, the courts have resoundingly said this type of internal policy isn’t the law.