Various stuff guys:
1) Note that the OP said that this was from the same batch as the other tin he had that had mold. That's the only production date we've had reports of mold on for Bijou and we've had very few reports. That production run was 1,200 tins. We've had a tiny handful (total isn't handy because the guy tracking this (Ted) is on a plane right now, but we're talking 3 or 4 tins) from that run with reports of problems. We've smoked dozens from that run ourselves and haven't encountered mold. And at this point, we have to assume that most of those tins have been opened and smoked and it has since been through five more production runs (ranging in size from 240 tins to 1,000 tins).
2) We've already offered to compensate the OP.
3) We've fixed the production problem.
4) A lot of the present consternation is simple a function of the fact that this is news because of CRF. It's sort of like fear of flying. Flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving, but plane crashes are newsworthy and spectacular and car crashes are routine and boring, hence flying seems more dangerous. Similarly, on the heels of us asking for CRF back, it seems like this is all part of some newsworthy pattern, when no pattern exists. The examples brought up in the past few weeks (of which we're up to 10 we know of) are from batches spread across more than two years and (again, aside from CRF) represent something like 1/60,000th of production during that time.
I know it seems like this is happening all over to 'everybody,' but it's sort of like plane crashes in the news: they seem like they happen with some frequency because they tend to dominate the news cycle, but it's really vanishingly rare by comparison to the number of flights globally annually. Similarly, this is on everyone's mind because of the CRF mess made news (which really was our screw up), not because there's anything systemic.
So, I've read a number of comments suggesting various vague calls for us to get to the bottom of this. We have. We've fixed the CRF problem, we've reformulated our mold inhibitor for everything, we ran tests for mold issues on various products in various states and we will happily replace tins with problems. Should 3 or 4 out of 1,200 tins from a production run that had problems negate the experience of the other hundreds of people who didn't encounter problems, smoked it and were happy (me included, having gone through three tins myself)? Especially given we want to replace those tins for the customer.
I get that there's a desire that we 'do something,' but we're already doing many somethings. We've told you what we're doing.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for the OP to be irritated that he had two tins from the same batch that developed mold and we want to help him with the problem. Is there something else, given the rates of failure we're talking about in an organic product, that the OP (or someone else) thinks we should be doing?
Other questions:
The tin insert. It's not the problem (it is treated), but you're correct to spot the pattern. Because of the way the mold inhibitor was formulated pre-CRF for flakes, cakes and plugs, it was more likely to be a problem on the sorts of things that have the tin insert than don't. Of course, we're still talking about edge cases: 1/4000 or lower.
Sincerely,
Sykes Wilford
