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Prominent Irradiation Company Goes Belly-Up

SureBeam Corp., by far the most prominent food irradiation company in the U.S., has filed for bankruptcy. The move follows a series of problems, including a federal investigation into questionable accounting practices (sound familiar?), lawsuits filed by disgruntled stockholders, and a lack of interest in irradiated ground beef, the company.s main product.

SureBeam, which went into business in 2001, was a spin-off of San Diego-based Titan Corp., a defense contractor best known for its work on the .Star Wars. missile defense program. SureBeam took linear accelerators originally designed for the program and used them to irradiate food with electrons traveling near the speed of light. SureBeam opened irradiation facilities near Chicago and Los Angeles, and in Sioux City, Iowa. The company also has joint operations in Hawaii, Texas and Brazil, and planned to open facilities in Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.

SureBeam's brief history is a checkered one. The company frequently engaged in questionable marketing practices, referring to irradiation as .electronic pasteurization. and comparing irradiated food to pasteurized milk. Public Citizen filed several false advertising complaints against SureBeam with the Federal   Trade   Commission. SureBeam also frequently tried to reassure stockholders that FDA approval for the irradiation of ready-to-eat foods was just around the corner. This has yet to occur.

According to SureBeam, the company did manage to stock irradiated ground beef in several thousand grocery stores throughout the U.S., but it never released sales figures and consumers seemed reluctant to buy the products.

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