“Cornco and the Contaminated Corn" Case Study

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“CornCo and the Contaminated Corn" Case Study George is an operating manager for CornCo plant in Phoenix, AZ. CornCo is a company that operates buying corn and producing chips. The problem is that the corn future was on a rise, which also caused a raise in the overall costs of production. At the same time Abco Snack Foods has joined the chips business. The ethical issues arises when George had to find a way to fix the dilemma of production cost and staying competitive in order to prevent unemployment’s. In order to do this, George had find a cheap corn which will keep production cost low. However, the problem the corn was contaminated and this was the reason it was so cheap. George knows that by the changing the contaminated corn with uncontaminated corn which he could cut down the aflatoxin concentrations in the final products. There are number of actual and potential ethical violations based on the Underwood Personal Ethical Model. George Wilson is having difficulties deciding if it is right for him to continue to use contaminated corn to manufacture corn chips. To maintain market share, lower production costs, and increase the company’s profits, Wilson is being pressured by CornCo’s vice president Jake Lamont to force grain elevator operators to sell to CornCo all their contaminated corn at a discount rate of 50%. If Wilson agrees to do this, the contaminated corn chips Cornco is already producing will increase the level of contamination higher than the current level of 10%. What’s more, CornCo’s employees began to understand that if Wilson don’t make the decision to continue to use contaminated corn, then the production cost will increase which will result in employees being laid off. Thus, some staff members were cooperative for Wilson to continue with the practice of using contaminated corn. After raising his concern to Lamont that buying even more
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