Nearly a year ago, in July 2017, Perdue AgriBusiness notified the Port of Oswego in New York that it was missing 80,000 bushels of soybeans valued at $1 million. Perdue stores soybeans and grains at the port and noticed the issue when it couldn’t fill a Great Lakes vessel last summer.
This issue was said to be a separate issue from the ongoing state Inspector General's office investigation that started two weeks after Perdue’s confirmation of the issue.
After investigating the issue, Joe Forsthoffer, Perdue spokesman, explained that the issue has been resolved and a third party is to blame.
“Working with the port, we identified the error on the part of the third party that received the shipment,” he said. Perdue continues to have a strong relationship with the customer.
At the time of a July 2017 board meeting, Cherry Hammill said it was most likely the delivery system that was responsible for the issue.
“We hardly make any mistakes here,” he said at the meeting, according to Oswego County News.
After recently resolving the issue, Forsthoffer said the company will continue to do business at the port.
“We have a great relationship with the Port of Oswego Authority Board and the port is strategically important to our local origination and trading operations. As we said all along, we were working together with the Port and were both confident of the outcome. That’s exactly what happened,” he said.
Forsthoffer refrained from mentioning the name of the third-party company that was at fault.
“We’ve worked with the Port of Oswego to make changes to our processes, and we're confident that, should there be a similar discrepancy with a receiving customer, we would notice it right away,” he said.
