OTTAWA—The federal food safety watchdog reprimanded an XL Foods Inc. slaughterhouse on six separate occasions last year before discovering the E. coli contamination that prompted the biggest recall of meat in Canadian history.

The Star obtained six “Corrective Action Requests”— the reports federal food inspectors file when they notice something amiss — the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) issued to the XL Foods plant in Brooks, Alta., last year.

The six reports — including listing outstanding issues from the previous year — detail a number of contraventions of the Meat Inspection Regulations observed at the plant before the U.S. agriculture department and CFIA both found E. coli O157:H7 on beef trimmings originating from the XL Foods plant in early September.

The Public Health Agency of Canada confirmed 18 cases of people getting sick from the same strain of harmful bacteria.

An in-depth investigation into the E. coli contamination led to six more corrective action requests in September — and the subsequent temporary shutdown of the plant — and none of the earlier ones the Star obtained through Access to Information legislation are related directly to the recall.

The corrective action requests describe a number of issues the inspectors had trouble with, including the carcasses of cows and bulls dragging on the floor, workers not properly segregating inedible parts from edible parts or the tubs they are carried in, not sanitizing equipment such as knives or hooks between carcasses, and washing with unidentified liquid or sanitizer that is not meant for food products.

Inspectors had to halt the production line five times between February and August last year, including once during a follow-up inspection when there was “plastic overflowing with unsanitary water and condensation dripping from rails/structures in stimulator hallway onto carcasses.”

The food inspection agency held back 765 carcasses as a result.

The corrective action requests also describe a building in need of some repairs, with paint peeling and flaking posts and beams, cracks and seams in the floor in need of caulking, exposed insulation, rust, broken doors and uneven flooring leading to the pooling of water.

All of the corrective action requests were closed within three months of being issued.

Rick Holley, a professor of food safety at the University of Manitoba, said the things spotted at the XL Foods plant could have been symptomatic of a greater problem.

“There just seemed to be lax control over items that would normally, as part of a program of good manufacturing practice, be more or less instilled in the employees as issues that needed to be self-corrected. It shouldn’t have to be identified by the CFIA, but it should tell the CFIA, or should have at the time . . . raised red flags that there was something going on behind the scenes in terms of the company program that really needed to be tweaked, and tweaked considerably,” Holley said in an interview.

Still, he noted, things are easier to see now.

“Hindsight is always great,” Holley said.

Dr. Harpreet Kochhar, executive director of western operations at the food inspection agency, said the corrective action requests were nothing out of the ordinary — either in number or content — for a plant of that volume, age and number of employees.

“Obviously, you will probably see certain issues off and on and our role as an inspection agency is to make sure that even a small amount of non-compliance, if ever seen, has to be documented and brought to their attention so that people do not develop those habits that (would lead them to) continue to do certain things which will compromise food safety,” Kochhar said.

Kochhar noted the reason the review team went into the plant after the discovery of E. coli was that inspectors had not found anything abnormal in terms of “deviation from food safety principles.”

That led to six more corrective action requests and then a suspended operating licence, but the primary cause of the E. coli contamination remains unknown.

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“They turned up little bits and pieces, but not a single specific cause,” Kochhar said of the review team.

XL Foods did not respond to requests for comment.

Cameron Bruett, a spokesman for JBS USA, the company that took over management of the XL Foods plant in Brooks last fall, said he could not comment on anything that happened at the plant prior to the takeover.