Jack in the Box

Case Study #1

E.coli crisis at Jack in the Box

Our case study pertains to the 1993 E.coli crisis that Jack in the Box experienced in the state of Washington. Within a months’ time, three children died due to complications associated with E.coli poisoning, and over 400 people were infected. We are to review the information provided and examine whether Jack in the Box’s president, Robert Nugent, responded to the crisis exemplifying corporate responsibility to his stakeholders. We are to determine the challenge of responding to such events, whether the context of the crisis affected Mr. Nugent’s ability to respond, and provide our recommendation to other managers that may find themselves in a similar situation. We will look at the role of corporate responsibility in responding to organizational crises and discuss whether responsible crisis communication equates to effective crisis management.

From the information provided in the case study it appears that Mr. Nugent did not handle the crisis well. Initially, Nugent passed off the accountability for weeks. He was delayed in corporate transparency to the public, and tried to the deflect blame onto others. Throughout the crisis Nugent used words such as, “unclear”, “reluctant”, “speculate”, and “cross-contamination” when addressing the public, and the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Agricultural Research (2011, p. 103-104). There was another situation similar to the Jack in the Box crisis in 2008, when Canadian based Maple Leaf Foods had a Listeria food contamination, which resulted in the death of twenty people and illness to many others. The difference was their CEO, Michael McCain, immediately after being made aware of the outbreak publicly, through television and social media, acknowledged that Listeria had been found in some of the company’s food products, recalled and pulled all other contaminated products, and apologized to those affected (Laasch & Conaway, 2015, p. 66). Maple Leaf opted for openness and...