Peanuts to the rescue

Bill Cotterell

Tallahassee Democrat capital bureau

June 21, 2009

TALLAHASSEE -- In a state budget of about $66 billion, saving $210,000 is peanuts.

For a small business feeling the pinch of an unrelated health scare early this year, quick intervention by the state prison system and governor's office saved 14 jobs and kept the company going.

Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil recounted the story in his departmental newsletter. It involves three factors: State inmates eating a lot of peanut butter; the prison system taking over food services from a contractor that backed out last year; and the Jacksonville plant struggling to stay in operation.

Ernest Turbeville, president of Sunshine Peanut Co., wrote to Gov. Charlie Crist last March.

He said his company was the only peanut-butter maker in Florida. After the health warnings about a large Georgia peanut company's shipments early this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and federal Food and Drug Administration inspected the Jacksonville plant and conducted laboratory tests, certifying his product safe.

Turbeville wrote to Crist that he couldn't get any business with Aramark, the prisons' previous food contractor. McNeil said Sunshine was apparently not aware that Aramark had ended its contract with the state and the department took over food operations early this year.

"It was a blessing from God, the way it worked out for us," Turbeville said Friday. "I'd already told the employees we would be letting them go because we didn't have any more work for them in about 30 days. What the governor's office and the Department of Corrections did was, they saved a company."

In the DOC newsletter, McNeil said the department reached an agreement on March 25 to use Sunshine peanut butter in the prisons.

"Not only will Mr. Turbeville's 14 employees keep their jobs, but the state of Florida will save approximately $210,000 per year by buying from this Florida vendor," wrote McNeil.

He credited Charlie Terrell and the staff of the DOC Bureau of Institutional Support and Tom Tomblin of U.S. Foodservice, the department's supplier, with expediting the deal. McNeil also thanked Crist's office "for bringing the issue to our attention.

"Each of you should know you contributed to keeping 14 Florida citizens gainfully employed and to saving Florida taxpayers quite a bit of money," he wrote.