An 8-year-old Wisconsin girl is heading to New York City next week to compete for a $25,000 college scholarship in a national peanut butter competition for her sandwich shaped like a hedgehog.

Jif peanut butter announced Tuesday that Alexandra Miller's sandwich created in the image of a hedgehog received enough votes in an online competition last month to earn her one of five finalist spots in the Jif Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest (the Jif website totally sucks and I can’t find the picture; it’s also quite sexist; here’s a hedgehog, right).

The recipe, dubbed The Happy Hedgehog, places 1 tablespoon of Jif Creamy Peanut Butter and 1 teaspoon of Smucker's sugar-free red raspberry preserve between two slices of whole wheat bread. It's cut into a circle, with the edges pressed together to seal it. Ten pretzel sticks form the hedgehog quills, and almond slivers create ears with raisins for eyes and a Bugle chip for a nose. The hedgehog is complete with raspberry fruit strip feet, and green apple slices with peanut butter piped on top for grass.

Will the gimmick help sales?

Americans bought 41.8 million pounds of jarred peanut butter in the four-week period ending Feb. 21 - 13.3 percent less than in the same period the previous year, research firm Nielsen reported Tuesday.

The period's sales were the lowest of any in the three years Nielsen has tracked the U.S. food, drug, and mass merchandisers segment, which includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation's largest retailer.

Executives said last month that they were seeing weakness in Jif sales because of the outbreak, even though Jif was not affected. The company ran ads in more than 100 papers and aired national consumers saying the Jif brand is safe.

But that safety data is not publicly available. The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent -- whether it's live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website -- to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.
 

It’s as bad as it gets.

Early reporting from today’s U.S. Congressional oversight and investigation subcommittee hearing where Peanut Corp. of America President Stewart Parnell was forced to appear and is expected to take the Fifth Amendment and not testify, depicts a company focused on profits rather than food safety.

E-mails between Parnell and Sammy Lightsey, manager of the company’s Blakely plant, were released as part of a congressional hearing that started at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

• In one e-mail, Lightsey wrote Parnell discussing positive salmonella tests on its products, but Parnell gave instructions to nonetheless “turn them loose” after getting a negative test result from another testing company.

• In another e-mail, Parnell expressed his concerns over the losing “$$$$$$” due to delays in shipment and costs of testing.

• Parnell in another company-wide e-mail told employees there was no salmonella in its plants, instead accusing the news media of “looking for a news story where there currently isn’t one.”

On Jan. 19, Parnell sent an e-mail to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pleading with the agency to let it stay in business.

He wrote that company executives “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money.”

Other revelations underpinning the Salmonella outbreak:

• The Georgia Department of Agriculture conducted two inspections of the company’s Blakely, Ga. plant in 2008, but did not test for salmonella on its own on either occasion — despite an internal agency goal to conduct such tests once a year.

• The company’s largest customers, including Kellogg’s, engaged contractors to conduct audits, but they did not conduct their own salmonella tests.

*The FDA did not test for salmonella at the plant, despite the 2007 salmonella outbreak traced to the Con-Agra plant about 70 miles from Peanut Corp. of America’s Blakely plant.

“With eight dead and almost 600 sick, it’s a time to be prudent.”

That’s what I told CNN Radio late last night in response to a question about the adverts placed by Conagra Foods Incorporated and J.M. Smucker Company in an attempt to bolster peanut butter sales, which have plunged at least 25 percent since the salmonella outbreak. Oh, and with baby Sorenne around (right, exactly as shown), anything after 9:30 p.m. is late.

“None of these companies are really coming out and saying this is what we do to ensure safety. They say, yeah, we test for salmonella. But are those tests public? They’re not. …

“If you’re a parent packing a lunch and you have all the hectic things going on in the morning, is it really realistic to say, hey, before you put that peanut snack cracker individually wrapped item into your kid’s lunch you’re going to go onto the Internet and check a Web site? I think that’s a bit much. I think it’s prudent to avoid this stuff until we see where this is going.”

A story in Saturday’s  N.Y. Times will report that sales of all brands of peanut butter are down by nearly 25 percent – and those numbers will get worse.

The contaminated peanut butter traced to the Georgia plant represents a small percentage of the total $800 million in annual sales by the peanut butter companies in the United States. But the public relations problem for the rest of the industry is unlikely to ease anytime soon. …

So far, the salmonella outbreak has been linked to 575 illnesses and eight deaths, and more than 1,500 products have been recalled, including cookies, ice cream and pet food.

In response, brands like Jif and Peter Pan are taking out ads to tell shoppers that their products are not affected, and giving them a coupon.

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Oh, I’m sorry, I fell asleep.

Instead of telling consumers what they aren’t, maybe the big peanut butter types could tell people what they are – the food safety steps they take to produce a product that won’t make people barf.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent -- whether it's live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website -- to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

The makers of Jif and Peter Pan have already gone on record saying they will not disclose their own food safety test results.