Resource：http://www.scu.edu/ethics/dialogue/candc/cases/nutritional.html

Food is indispensable in our life and the quality of the food is always a big issue that people concern. At a meeting of the Ethics Center’s Ethics Roundtable for Executives, Kirk O. Hanson, director of Stanford University’s Sloan Program at the Graduate School of Business, created a fictitious case to help discuss this question：

Fred James, chief executive of Nutritional Foods Inc. received two reports from the health departments. One was from Seattle,another was from Southern California.Two different places but occurred similar situation: a child was acute food poisoning of an unpasteurized apple product produced by Nutritional Foods.The health departments said that there perhaps had other possible causes.They didn’t have enough information and also didn’t have the batch numbers for the products in question.

Nutritional Foods was becoming the best-known brand of natural or nonpasteurized foods in the Western United States. The company is really strict on their produce process and the distribution.The vice president for production,John Healy was startled a short time later to receive a third and fourth report similar to the first two. After Healy and James had a short discussio, they took actions quickly and tried to solve the problem properly.

The main ethical issue is what the company will action when the Product quality problem occurred,will the company choose to do the method benefit the consumer or their own profit.

Actually, in the real world not every company will choose the corrcet action, the “china sanlu milk powder incident” can be a specific negative example for this kind of business ethics.Economic doesn’t mean to do anything to maximize the profit. It is still bulit on the Legal and moral.