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Today, JOANNE R EGGLESTON <[log in to unmask]> posted about her experiences
with Quaker Rice Cakes:
 
> After feeling ill for the past week and my
>mother being sick for almost two weeks, I decided to recontact them
>again to verify GF status etc.  But, this time, I also wanted to know
>how they process the rice cakes.
 
>To my astonishment, I was told, yes they run ALL of their rice cakes
>on the same line.  She assured me though that the line was cleaned
>well between each rice cake that was run.
.....
>Then to top this off, it still gets worse. She also told me because
>of the large volume of grain they import in, they can't be sure that
>their supplies haven't accidentally gotten wheat in with corn, or
>wheat in with the brown rice!!
 
I have tried to stick with the smaller food companies that supply health food
stores, because they appear more sensitive to issues of cross-contamination and
purity of ingredients.  When I call them, it is relatively easy to convince the
customer service personnel to let me speak with their food chemist, or head of
quality control, or some such person who is actually in charge.
 
Sometimes the entire production of these smaller firms is GF.  When the same
equipment is used to produce GF and non-GF products, they often already know
that they need to do a total clean-up between runs, and they produce the GF
products first thing in the morning.
 
The mass market companies often seem to hedge more, probably because their
legal departments are worried about lawsuits from Celiacs who feel they got
sick due to their food.  I have found that smaller companies are often willing
to call up their own suppliers to chase down info on questionable ingredients,
whereas larger companies often just say they don't know and can't guarantee.
 
The above thoughts are my personal generalizations which cannot be uniformly
correct.  I don't mean to imply that the mass market companies are "bad", or
always insensitive to Celiacs (although I have been corresponding with
McDonald's for over a year trying to get them to take the wheat flour out of
their hash browns, to address the cross-contamination issue with their French
Fries. No success).  One disadvantage is that the health food store brands
usually cost more, too.
 
Bill Elkus
Los Angeles