Alexandra Webb
PR Case Study
General Mills is an American multinational company producing consumer goods
and markets more than one hundred consumer brands such as Cheerios, Betty Crocker,
Yoplait, Pillsbury, Nature Valley, Green Giant, Old El Paso, and Progresso just to name a
few major ones (General Mills businesses, 2014). The company`s headquarters are
located in Minneapolis, Minnesota where it started in 1866 by a man named Cadwallader
Washburn (General Mills history, 2014). Recently General Mills has experienced a major
public relations crisis for their company. The company had to recall over ten million
pounds of flour and flour products produced between December of 2015 and May 2016
due to the potential risk of potentially deadly strands of e-coli in the flour (Collins, 2016).
There have been no affirmative findings of e-coli in the production facilities or inventory
of General Mills but thirty-eight people across twenty states have reported becoming ill
between the dates of the released products from using their flour products when cooking
(Collins, 2016). Since the reports have started the crisis has only gotten worse for the
company and other companies involved with their products but they have handled the
crisis in an affective and efficient manner in order to ensure the best outcome they can in
this scenario. The problem started internally for the company because they feared that
their products could have been contaminated so they went ahead and pulled their
products off the shelf without knowing for sure that it could be their products or
something else making consumers sick. It seems that if they were so quick to pull
millions of their products off the shelves that they were worried enough that it for sure
could have came from somewhere in their company which makes it easy to believe that
they were concerned that they weren’t following guidelines while working in order to
prevent something like this from happening. In a way the problem could have started
externally as well resulting from something outside the factory in the growing process.
Because flour is made from wheat there is always a chance that it can contain bacteria
especially when consumed raw in the cooking process. Also consumers that consumed
raw dough or batter from the flour of even other products when cooking could have
caused the outbreak and not necessarily something that happened on the inside of the
company.
The company’s primary goals are listed in the pursuits section of their website as
put people first, build a culture of creating, make food with passion, earn people`s trust,
and treat the world with care (General Mills purpose, 2014). They want to earn peoples
