In the fresh produce aisle, a single food safety crisis rarely remains contained to the brand on the label. When a pathogen outbreak like cyclospora hits the fresh produce category, consumer panic often spreads across the entire department, driving shoppers away from safe, compliant products alongside implicated ones. For Bobby Chacko, CEO of Bonduelle Americas, this recurring fallout exposes an innate structural issue in how fresh produce is bought and sold, what he says is an industry-wide obsession with unit price over total cost.
While Bonduelle Americas was not connected to the reported illnesses, the situation prompted Chacko to publish an op-ed in The New York Times, titled “The Economics of Trust,” challenging the retail sector to re-evaluate its core procurement incentives. Speaking in an interview with The Packer, Chacko made his core thesis clear: “The lowest purchase price isn’t always the lowest total cost.”
For retail procurement teams operating on razor-thin margins, prioritizing rock-bottom quotes on vendor RFPs can seem like simple fiduciary discipline. However, Chacko points out that this narrow focus ignores the financial liabilities associated with category-wide trust erosion.
The True Cost of Lowest-Bid Procurement
“When we consider the economic impact of not making those investments, it translates into stock price, market capitalization and most importantly, brand equity,” Chacko says. “Damaging those brands erodes trust — and that is why the cheapest price is not always the best price.”
To illustrate how consumers perceive reliability, Chacko points to an everyday parallel in commercial aviation.
“I use the analogy of the airline tire. I never think of a tire when I get on a plane, and I travel a lot, and you know there are a lot of people that work on those tires to ensure it lands safely every time — not once in a while, but every time — and I think that’s the economics of trust or the basis of it,” Chacko says. Consumers do not purchase salad greens intending to evaluate a farm’s water-testing protocols; they expect safety to be absolute and invisible, he says.
Field-Level Fallout and the Human Cost
Achieving that standard requires continuous, unglamorous investment in supplier verification, field-level testing and supply chain traceability. Behind those invisible systems are specialized food safety teams whose labor is too often treated as an overhead compliance cost rather than a value driver.
“We need to make sure as leaders in our industry that we recognize them for the amount of work they put in to ensure that last mile of safety,” Chacko says. He calls his message an advocacy piece for Bonduelle’s safety personnel and its 173-year-old French parent company’s century-long commitment to plant-rich foods.
The consequences of underinvesting in safety extend far beyond corporate balance sheets; they ripple directly down to field operations. When an outbreak triggers a market slowdown, farmers across major growing regions like California and Arizona are forced to halt operations.
“We’ve had many farmers having to go back and till under their fields,” Chacko says. “I always think about the worker waiting for his shift to harvest, only to be told he can’t get out there. It impacts constituents across the entire board.”
When these disruptions occur, Chacko believes the industry’s default posture — remaining silent and waiting for the news cycle to pass — only fuels public uncertainty.
“I am not an advocate for being quiet all the time,” Chacko says. Instead, he calls on independent fresh produce organizations, processors and retailers to actively step forward.
“Hey, we have had an issue as an industry, but look, we have now replenished with products that we have tested, and we need to be able to bring that calm to the consumer industry,” he says.
Ultimately, Chacko views food safety as an industry-wide responsibility. “It’s not about one company versus another. It’s as an industry we need to bring calm to the consumer markets,” Chacko says. “It’s one for all and all for one because we are in this together, and we need to make sure we bring that value and the economics of trust to consumers.”
Echoing this perspective, Jessica Adkins, chief of staff for Bonduelle Americas, adds that maintaining trust is far cheaper than trying to rebuild it.
“You can lose trust so quickly if you don’t have the right fundamentals in place ... it costs a lot more if you lose the trust of consumers because you don’t have the right food safety pieces in place versus making sure we’re really at the forefront of driving the right quality and safety.”
