Contamination by undeclared allergens or bacteria/pathogens might be a nightmare scenario, but there are best practices businesses can follow to a) help avoid and b) handle contamination events to minimise harm.
In this article, Food Formulator interviewed Rodolfo Tamez, Technical Director at quality control and compliance company QIMA, to break down each step of the damage control process.
What contaminants are most frequently behind product recalls in the food industry?
Looking at FDA recall, market withdrawal and safety alert notices from 20 March 2025 through to 4 September 2026, two causes account for around 80% of the incidents we tracked: undeclared allergens and bacterial or pathogen contamination.
On the pathogen side, Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes are the two most common, together making up most microbiological recalls. Salmonella shows up most often in fresh produce including cucumbers, salads, sprouts, nuts, tahini and spices, as well as eggs, shrimp and pet food.
Listeria is concentrated in ready-to-eat categories like cheese, deli salads, sandwiches, seafood, frozen and ready meals, and produce like mushrooms and sprouts that have contact with soil.
What precautions should food manufacturers take to help avoid contamination?
The foundation to building best practices to avoid contamination is having a documented, preventive food-safety system built on HACCP, preventive controls, GMPs and applicable FDA/USDA requirements.
That starts with a hazard analysis specific to your product and identifying critical control points for four categories including pathogens, major allergens, foreign materials and chemical contaminants. You then need to validate your kill steps and other control steps – cooking, pasteurisation, acidification and refrigeration – rather than assuming they work.
Sanitation needs written procedures for equipment, food-contact surfaces, drains and high-care areas, verified through inspection, ATP testing and microbiological swabbing rather than assumed. Raw and ready-to-eat materials, people, tools and traffic patterns should be separated so cross-contamination doesn’t happen by proximity.
A recall isn’t complete when the product is removed – it requires a documented root-cause investigation
Testing should also extend to drains, wheels, floors and equipment framework, not just the finished product, with every positive result investigated rather than treated as a one-off. For ready-to-eat facilities specifically, that means real Listeria and Salmonella environmental programmes with trend analysis.
Regarding suppliers, approval and auditing are two different steps. Approval should be based on documented food-safety performance and risk factors tied to location and product type. Auditing should focus on higher-risk suppliers specifically and verify their actual controls for pathogens, toxins, allergens, heavy metals and foreign materials, rather than relying on the paperwork alone.
Given how much of our dataset was allergen recalls, allergen control deserves its own discipline.
What is your advice in terms of safe recall and restoring consumer confidence?
The moment contamination is suspected, several things need to happen immediately:
- Place the affected product and related lots on hold
- Stop shipment and, where appropriate, stop production on the affected line
- Preserve samples, production records, environmental swabs, labels and equipment conditions
- Notify the food-safety, quality, regulatory and executive teams
- Assess whether other products, lots, facilities, suppliers or distribution centers may be involved
- Contact the relevant regulatory authority promptly if the hazard could make the food adulterated or injurious
Testing matters, but it shouldn’t delay protective action. For hazards like botulism, STEC, Listeria or an undeclared major allergen, the company should act conservatively while confirmation is underway if the available evidence points to a credible risk.
Once contamination is confirmed, a recall needs to run through a written, tested plan, starting with defining the scope precisely: type and class of contamination, product name and description, brand and package size, lot codes, dates and UPCs, the production lines, farms or time periods involved, raw-material lots, and every distribution center, retailer, food-service customer and export destination affected.
Regulators, commercial customers and certification bodies need to be notified with the hazard and its supporting evidence, affected product and lot information, distribution records, quantity produced and distributed, a health-risk assessment, corrective actions already taken, and plans for effectiveness checks and product disposition.
The public notice needs to be explicit, stating what the product is, how to identify it, that it should not be eaten, used, sold or served, whether to discard or return it, what to do if it was used in another food, relevant symptoms and when to seek medical care, and a toll-free number, website and refund information.
The product itself then needs to be physically removed and controlled:
- Stop shipment immediately and quarantine inventory
- Notify every recipient in the distribution chain
- Verify removal from retail shelves, vending machines, restaurants and institutional kitchens
- Reconcile quantities produced, shipped, recovered and destroyed
- Prevent re-entry into commerce and document destruction or reconditioning under approved procedures
Effectiveness checks close the loop: confirming customers received and acted on the notice, retailers removed the product, public notices reached consumers, recovered quantities are consistent with distribution records and no additional affected lots remain in commerce.
A recall isn’t complete when the product is removed. It requires a documented root-cause investigation covering sanitation failures, equipment design or maintenance, supplier issues, process deviations, employee practices, allergen changeover and labelling controls, water or pest problems, inadequate testing or release procedures and traceability gaps.
