VOORHEESVILLE — When Elex Scheels bought her triplets a snack billed as health food, she didn’t expect to end up at the doctor’s office.

After eating a bag of Veggie Booty, a puffed rice snack, earlier this year, though, two of her children came down sick. The Centers for Disease Control found that the food was contaminated with salmonella and Robert’s American Gourmet, the company that produced the product, issued a recall on June 28.

The contaminated food is now leading the Scheels family to the courthouse as their lawyer and federal agencies seek the source of the poison.

The first sickness from the contaminated Veggie Booty was seen in March, said Anandia Sheth, an epidemiologist for the CDC. As of July 18, she said, there had been 65 total illnesses in 20 states due to the product.

Thirty-six of the families who were affected are suing Robert’s, including the Scheelses. Most cases of this sort take six months to a year and are usually settled before going to trial, said William Marler, the Seattle-based lawyer who is representing the families.

Two different strains of salmonella were found in the Veggie Booty by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture Laboratory. According to the CDC, the lab isolated both Salmonella Wandsworth and Salmonella Typhimurium.
"In 15 years of doing these cases, this is the first time I’ve ever seen two forms of salmonella isolated out of a product," Marler said.

Sheth, at the CDC, said that the center has found multiple strains in contaminated foods before, although it’s not common.

Having two different strains of salmonella indicates that there was more than one contaminated ingredient, which is significant, Marler said.
"To just simply have the company say, ‘Well, the spices came from China and we got them from this other company,’ doesn’t absolve them," he said of how Robert’s has handled the situation.
Robert’s American Gourmet declined comment this week and referred questions to its lawyer, Andrew Cooper, who did not return calls. In a release dated July 12, though, Robert’s named Atlantic Quality Spice and Seasonings, a division of Van de Vries Corporation of Edison, N.J., as the company that sold the contaminated ingredient. The release also states, "It is believed that the ingredient at issue was obtained from China."

Both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration said that the spice’s country of origin hasn’t yet been identified.

A spokeswoman for Atlantic, who would only identify herself as Jennie, would not answer questions, but said that the company had recently been sold. She would not give the name of the company that had bought Atlantic because it did not want its name to be associated with the salmonella outbreak, she said.
According to a Feb. 2, 2004 release from India Brook Partners, the New York City financial advisory firm that brokered the deal, Cinnamon Acquisition Company purchased Atlantic. India Brook’s chief executive officer, Jeffrey Tarplin, is quoted in the release as saying, "With the Atlantic Spice acquisition, we continue our focus in the food industry. Atlantic is a highly successful and well established company with a blue chip customer roster that includes Kraft Foods, Starbucks and Williams Sonoma."
Cinnamon Acquisition Company was "organized by Stanley Gorski, Jr. and the senior management team," the release says. This week, a spokesman for India Brook said that he hadn’t heard of Cinnamon Acquisition Company.

Part of the larger problem with distribution of contaminated food is the lack of information available to the public, Marler said.
"We do know that the Veggie Booty company is located in Long Island, N.Y., but they don’t actually puff the product and mix the spices there. It’s made somewhere else, but yet we don’t know where that is," he said. "I don’t know if it’s in Pennsylvania or Guatemala."

According to a 2002 FDA report recalling Pirate’s Booty, Fruity Booty, and Veggie Booty, the manufacturer, Keystone Foods, is in Easton, Pa. Those snacks, all distributed by Robert’s American Gourmet, were recalled because some of the nutrition facts on the label were incorrect.
"In this instance, there was something in the system that allowed fecal material from some animal to get into the Veggie Booty," Marler said. With the number of ingredients that go into making Veggie Booty, it would be hard to determine which one was the contaminant, he said.
Most salmonella cases are worth in the $100,000 range, Marler said of the typical amount awarded to victims of food poisoning. As for the effect it might have on the company, he said, "I think it could be devastating."