Hummus made with love and chickpeas

That's the new slogan for Tribe, a major manufacturer of hummus owned by Nestle. Gabriel Collazzo, a former worker of the Tribe plant in Taunton, Ma., would question that slogan. Gabriel's brother, Daniel, was killed in December 2011 while cleaning the hummus-making machines at the Tribe plant.  

It looks as though Daniel's death could have been prevented had the plant followed a standard safety practice known as "lock out/tag out." It requires employees to be trained to cut power to industrial machinery before cleaning activities begin. In 2009 the company had been fined for failing to follow this procedure in another of its plants. Tribe's own consultant had warned that failing to train cleaning workers in lock out/tag out created "an extreme safety risk," and said "the probability that a fatality could occur is likely certain within a year's time frame."

I had thought that Tribe was a local company and a rather small one. It was a surprise to me that it is owned by Tivall 1993 Ltd., a subsidiary of OSEM Investments Ltd., one of the largest food companies in Israel. Last year, it generated $109 million in profit The majority owner of OSEM Investments is the Swiss food products conglomerate Nestle SA, which earned $10 billion in profits last year on sales of $92 billion.