A former food worker from Cold Spring, Minnesota, was sentenced to a 90-day jail stint after being convicted of intentionally contaminating nearly 56,000 pounds of chicken. The employee confessed to the crime after investigators found incriminating surveillance footage and forensic evidence against her.

Faye Slye, 37, was charged with two felony counts after purposefully causing damage to property in the first degree. Slye will additionally be required to pay $200,000 in restitution to GNP Company, the food processing company she was formerly employed with, for contaminating its "Gold'n Plump" and "Just BARE" chicken brands. She was expected to serve her 90-day sentence in 30-day increments over the next three years, according to Food Safety News. She will also be placed on probation for five years.

The Cold Spring-Richmond Police Department was called in after GNP discovered that chicken produced between Jun. 6 and Jun. 9, 2016, contained dirt and sand. After GNP surveillance footage Jun. 7 and 8 indicated Slye exhibited suspicious behavior, she admitted to contaminating thousands of chickens by putting them in plastic bags filled with dirt and sand she obtained from the plant's parking lot.

Surveillance footage showed Slye straggling behind other workers before removing her gloves and plastic sleeves, according to WJON. She was then seen reaching for her shirt pockets and brushing her hands off by her overshirt thereafter. Investigators obtained Slye's plastic sleeves and found a substance that appeared to be the contaminated chicken.

While a third-party lab determined that the materials the chicken were contained with were harmless, GNP recalled the food because it couldn't say "with 100% certainty" that the product was safe to consume, according to The Daily Meal. Consumers were advised to either dispose of the contaminated product or return it to the original site of purchase.

The intentional adulteration of food is a protection made by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Created in 2013, this act aimed to prevent wide-scale harm of this caliber to the public's health.

Under FSMA, food processing facilities are required to establish defense plans to avoid such threats.

"Such acts, while not likely to occur, could cause illness, death, economic disruption of the food supply absent mitigation strategies," the FDA wrote on its website. "Rather than targeting specific foods or hazards, this rule requires mitigation (risk-reducing) strategies for processes in certain registered food facilities."

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