Loyalty cards plus legwork can track beef buying

If you use a supermarket loyalty card, the store knows a lot about what you buy. But can you use that card to find out if you bought recalled meat from the nation's first mad cow?

Not very easily, say supermarket chains that use such cards, which include the Safeway Club Card, QFC Advantage Card and Albertsons Preferred Savings Card.

"Our Preferred Card doesn't track purchases with sufficient detail to tell whether purchased ground beef was subject to recall," said Albertsons spokeswoman Danielle Killpack. "No preferred card tracks that level of data."

The information tracked by the card will reveal that you bought ground beef on a specific date, but it won't necessarily tell you, without further sleuthing by the store, whether it happens to be recalled meat.

Despite critics' claims that the cards smack of "Big Brother" privacy invasion, supermarket-chain officials say the cards don't automatically link back to a specific box of beef a market got from a supplier.

To do that, says Jeff Burt, vice president of sales and marketing for QFC, the store must go through "grinder logs" that detail exactly which box of meat was used to make up specific packages for sale.

QFC, Safeway and Albertsons officials repeat the U.S. Department of Agriculture's insistence that it's extremely unlikely the recalled meat contains the infectious agent that causes mad-cow disease. But they also concede that some customers may be concerned about the hamburger they bought and might have eaten.

The stores say they'll help those customers use their cards to answer nagging questions.

To get their purchasing records, customers must jump through some hoops: verifying their identity, submitting requests in writing and, in the case of Safeway (which says its Washington stores didn't carry the recalled meat) going through its legal department.

QFC is requiring a signature, and Albertsons wants requests in writing. The research required by requests will be time-consuming, said Killpack of Albertsons, and consumers may have to wait a few weeks for an answer. "But absolutely we're willing to do it."

Mercer Island attorney Brian Weinstein found out that he had purchased some of the recalled beef after he asked QFC to check his Advantage Card purchase records. Although the card record revealed only that he purchased 91 percent extra-lean ground beef on a particular date, QFC's sole supplier was Interstate Meat Distributors, which distributed the recalled beef, so putting the two together was relatively easy.

Weinstein, along with some consumer groups, thinks retailers should use the cards to alert consumers who buy recalled products.

Linda Golodner, president of the National Consumers League, said gathering cardholders' e-mail addresses would make contact quick and easy.

"With something as important as this, I'd think they'd want to do it for their own customer relations."

Lynn Marmer, spokeswoman for The Kroger Co., which owns QFC, said company officials have discussed using the cards that way. But she and other grocery-chain officials say they think using the cards to contact customers would be slower and more cumbersome than relying on mass media and store notices.

"At this time, we feel the system we have works pretty well," Marmer said.

Carol M. Ostrom: 206-464-2249 or costrom@seattletimes.com