Blog Posts

Over 300 food recalls occurred in 2025. Let that number sink in. Not 300 isolated incidents with unique, unpreventable causes. Not 300 acts of nature beyond manufacturer control. Three hundred failures of systems, processes, and oversight that allowed unsafe food to reach consumers. November 2025 continued the relentless pattern — foreign matter contamination from glass, metal, and plastic; undeclared allergens appearing in products that should have been clearly labeled; microbial contamination including Listeria and E. coli that should have been prevented through proper controls. Each recall tells a story of what went wrong, but the collective pattern reveals a systemic problem in how food manufacturing approaches quality management. The question facing every food manufacturer isn’t whether recalls are increasing — the data clearly shows they are. The question is whether you’re operating with systems that prevent problems or merely document them after they occur. Because documenting problems doesn’t protect consumers.

In March 2025, FDA announced its intention to extend the Food Traceability Rule compliance date by 30 months, pushing the deadline from January 2026 to July 2028. For many food manufacturers, this felt like a reprieve — extra time to prepare, breathe, and focus on other priorities. But here’s the reality check: while compliance deadlines might have shifted, market expectations haven’t. Major retailers are already requiring FSMA 204 compliance from suppliers regardless of official deadlines. Industry leaders are implementing robust traceability systems to gain competitive advantage. And customers across the supply chain are increasingly demanding the transparency and rapid response that proper traceability enables. So while you’re waiting until 2028 to “have to” comply, your competitors are using traceability as a weapon to win your customers and your business. The question isn’t whether you’ll eventually need comprehensive traceability — that’s settled. The question is whether you’ll be a leader who

It’s 95°F outside. Your refrigeration units are working overtime. Production is running at peak capacity to meet summer demand. And somewhere in your facility, a temperature is slowly drifting out of specification — a trend that won’t be discovered until someone reviews paper logs tomorrow morning. Or maybe next week. Or possibly during your next audit. By then, how many batches have been affected? How much product is compromised? And more importantly, how do you prove to customers and regulators exactly when the deviation started and what corrective actions you took? Summer 2025 reinforced a critical lesson that food manufacturers learn repeatedly — and expensively: heat stress on cold chain management drives seasonal spikes in food safety incidents. Bacterial contamination incidents increased during the summer months, with patterns suggesting inadequate cold chain management during peak temperature periods. The European Centre for Infectious Diseases even issued advisories about increased Vibrio risks

Listeria monocytogenes doesn’t care about your cleaning schedule. It doesn’t respect your production protocols. And it absolutely doesn’t worry about your brand reputation — but you should. May 2025 brought another stark reminder of this pathogen’s persistence: widespread Listeria contamination across multiple food categories including washed-rind cheese, cooked chicken, pasta salad, and even pasteurized milk. The continuing pasta-related Listeria outbreak that began in June 2024 expanded throughout 2025, affecting major retailers and sickening dozens of consumers across 15 states. Fresh peaches — typically considered lower-risk produce — joined the recall list when processing environment contamination spread to products. These weren’t isolated incidents. They represent a fundamental truth that many food manufacturers learn the hard way: Listeria isn’t a production problem that you solve once. It’s an environmental challenge that requires constant vigilance, systematic controls, and modern monitoring approaches. If your Listeria control program consists mainly of hoping your cleaning procedures

A single undeclared allergen. That’s all it takes to trigger a recall that destroys thousands of units of product, generates emergency weekend work for your entire quality team, and puts your customer relationships at risk. Worse yet, it might not even be your “fault” — a supplier’s ingredient change, a packaging error, or a contaminated production line can turn your compliant product into a recall statistic. The numbers tell a stark story: undeclared allergens represented 48% of all food recalls from 2020 to 2024, making them the leading cause of recalls in the food industry. And the challenge just got more complex — in January 2023, sesame became the 9th major food allergen recognized in the United States, adding another layer of complexity to already demanding allergen management programs. For food manufacturers, allergen control isn’t just about compliance — it’s about protecting consumers with life-threatening allergies while safeguarding your brand,

Your quality manager’s phone rings at 8:47 PM on a Friday. It’s a supplier — they’ve just issued a recall notice for ingredient batches delivered throughout December. You need answers by Monday morning. How quickly can you identify every affected product? Do you know which batches are still in inventory versus already shipped? Can you provide customers with complete traceability data within hours, not days? If you’re reaching for spreadsheets and paper batch records, you already know this is going to be a very long weekend. The food manufacturing industry entered 2025 with a sobering reality: 2024 saw food recalls reach concerning levels, with the FDA tallying 241 food and beverage recalls and alerts — an 8% increase compared with 2023. More troubling still, more people got sick from contaminated food outbreaks than the year before. January alone brought multiple recalls for cheese products contaminated with Listeria and issues with