The Boar’s Head deli meat plant tied to a deadly food-poisoning outbreak in 2024 is back in business, company officials said.The Jarratt, Virginia, site resumed limited operations on Monday, nearly 17 months after it was shut down following the listeria outbreak that killed 10 people and sickened dozens.Boar's Head, a 120-year-old company based in Sarasota, Florida, permanently stopped making liverwurst and recalled 7 million pounds (more than 3 million kilograms) of deli products in the wake of the illnesses.But Natalie Dyenson, the company's chief food safety officer, told The Associated Press that the facility has been completely revamped and tested to ensure no contamination remains.“That facility has literally been rebuilt from the inside out,” Dyenson said in an interview Wednesday.The U.S.
Agriculture Department confirmed that federal inspectors required for operation are on siteThe reopening comes even as recent inspections of another Boar’s Head plant in Petersburg, Virginia, documented sanitation problems similar to those that federal health officials said may have contributed to the fatal outbreak.Records released this week to The Associated Press through a federal Freedom of Information Act request detailed dozens of “noncompliance reports” between July and December 2025.They included numerous instances of dripping condensation, meat residue left on equipment and in drains, and failure to follow the company’s own written listeria testing and monitoring procedures.“Today’s incident marks the fifth occurrence of this noncompliance in a month,” an inspector wrote on Oct.
25, after finding ham molds “dirty with smeared residue.”The latest 2025 reports follow previous inspections dating back several years documenting what inspectors called “general filth” at another Boar's Head site.Dyenson acknowledged that documentation of continued problems “sounds very disturbing,” but said that the company is working aggressively toward...