MCNEIL CONSUMER HEALTHCARE
Our people dedicate themselves to providing the most trusted brands and high-quality products to help others around the world. Thus, our experience with the McNeil Consumer Healthcare recalls has been difficult for all of us. Most important, we disappointed our customers. Trust and confidence in Johnson & Johnson and our products are fundamental to everything we do. Even though millions of customers remain supportive of our work to assure quality and restore our consumer brands to the market, that trust and confidence have been truly tested.
During this past year, I visited many manufacturing locations around the world. I can assure you that our people are dedicated to giving our customers the highest-quality products, with no compromises whatsoever. It is our responsibility to learn from what happened, address problems at their root causes and ensure that only the highest-quality products reach our customers. That hard work—and the subsequent results—will earn back trust and respect.
We are on our way to restoring McNeil Consumer Healthcare to the high levels of quality and compliance that people expect of all Johnson & Johnson companies and that we expect of ourselves.
As part of this commitment, we accelerated the implementation of organizational changes to our Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Quality and Compliance areas, which began early in 2010. We also undertook a thorough review of how we operated our manufacturing plants and examined in detail the historical production records of McNeil Consumer Healthcare products sold in the U.S. and produced in McNeil’s internal manufacturing network.
We have completed this internal review, and we will continue to conduct reviews at external sites that manufacture McNeil products. If these reviews reveal any further issues, we will not hesitate to take whatever steps are needed, including further market action, to ensure that our products meet world-class quality standards. These and other steps we have taken under the Comprehensive Action Plan submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) constitute an uncompromising effort to ensure high quality at McNeil. These actions will help us assure that moving forward, our products in the marketplace live up to the standards and expectations that consumers have for all products coming from Johnson & Johnson.
At the same time, we are focused on returning the recalled products to the marketplace in 2011. We began shipping a small amount of product in the fourth quarter of 2010, and alternate supply of the remaining key products will ramp up in the latter half of 2011. At the appropriate time, we will invest in market support for our over-the-counter brands. We also will be introducing product and packaging innovations for a number of products, especially those for young children.