The Case of Nutritional Foods {Presented by Harkkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa lClara University} By Kirk 0. Hanson What do we do when products go wrong? That question was explored by the Ethics Center's Ethics Roundtable for Executives at a September meeting featuring Greg Steltenpohl, chair of dealla Inc., and Kirk 0. Hanson, director of Stanford University's Sloan Program at the Graduate School of Business. To facilitate discussion of the issue. Hanson created the following ctitious case. It does not represent a real event, but it does provide aframework for looking at questions of product responsibility. The case is presented in four parts to mimic how such a scenario might evolve in real time. At each break in the case. stop and ask yourself what you would do given the information you have. First Wamings Fred James. chief executive of Nutritional Foods Inc.r a $50 million manufacturer of healthful foods. listened with concern as John Healyr his vice president for production, described reports that had come in during the past hour. The reports came from two county health departments, one in Seattle and the other in Southem California. In each case, the health department ofcial reported a possible link between acute food poisoning of a child and an unpasteurized apple product produced by Nutritional Foods and distributed throughout the Western United States. The health departments had not yet mled out all other possible causes. Additional information was not yet available, and Healy did not have batch numbers for the products in question. Nutritional Foods was rapidly becoming the bestknown brand of natural or nonpasteurized foods in the Western United States. It made its products in two facilities, one in California's Central 'valley and the other in a coastal city of Central California. Fresh fruit and vegetable products were shipped from growing regions throughout the West to these two facilities for processing and canning or bottling. The handling of