Why Food Gets Recalled, and How to Keep It From Being Yours

Dr. Bryan Quoc Le · Mendocino Food Consulting · November 2026

I went through every food recall FDA and USDA have published since 2012, all 9,012 of them, and coded what went wrong and why. The most common recall isn't contamination. It's an allergen that never made it onto the label. And once a company has one recall, the next one usually looks just like it.

Why I did this

When I help a startup get ready to launch, one of the first questions is always some version of "what could get us recalled?"

The public recall notices should answer that, but they're written one at a time, and they mostly say what was wrong, not why. "Undeclared milk." "Possible Listeria contamination." That tells you what happened to someone else, but not which control failed.

So I pulled both agencies' full recall records and coded each recall for the hazard, the root cause when the notice gives one, where the problem started, how it was found, and the kind of product. Two AI coders worked independently, a third broke ties, and I went through the hard cases and a random sample myself. The full methods are in the technical report.

What I found

1. Undeclared allergens are the #1 reason food gets recalled. They're more than a third of all recalls, ahead of pathogens.

Pathogen recalls are rarer but more serious: 81% of them are Class I, the category FDA uses when there's a reasonable chance of serious harm.

2. Most recall notices don't say why. Only about a third of recalls state a root cause at all. But when they do, the pattern is very clear:

Share of recalls whose notice states a root cause, and the most common cause among those that do. 9,012 FDA and USDA recalls.

The allergen result is the one I'd underline. When we know why an allergen got into a product without being declared, almost nine times out of ten it's a label problem: an allergen left off the ingredient list or the Contains statement, an allergen hiding inside a sub-ingredient that never got carried over, or simply the wrong label on the package. That's a paperwork failure, not a contamination failure, and it's cheap to prevent.

Pathogens are the opposite story. When a cause is given, it's almost always an ingredient that came in contaminated. Your supplier program does more to prevent a pathogen recall than any single test you run at the end.

3. One recall predicts the next. About 23% of manufacturers that had a recall went on to have another, and those repeat companies account for nearly half of all manufacturer recalls. The typical gap was a little over a year.

And the second recall usually looks like the first. If a company's first recall was for an undeclared allergen, 59% of the time its next one was too. For pathogens it was 52%. A first recall is basically a diagnosis of the weakest control in the plant.

4. Sesame recalls jumped after the FASTER Act. Sesame became the ninth major allergen on January 1, 2023. Sesame recalls went from 13 in the three years before to 67 in the three years after. Most of that is simply because undeclared sesame wasn't a recall-level labeling violation before 2023. It does mean sesame now belongs on every allergen review, alongside the other eight.

Five controls that prevent most recalls

None of these is exotic. Most small companies have some of them, but not written down or not done every time.

• Check every label against every ingredient. At each new supplier and each formula change, compare the finished label with the allergen statement of every ingredient and sub-ingredient. This one control goes straight at the most common recall there is.
• Approve your suppliers and get a certificate of analysis. Especially for spices, flour, nuts, produce and anything that won't get a kill step in your plant.
• Validate your process, and file it if FDA requires it. Acidified foods and low-acid canned foods need a filed scheduled process. One unfiled process at a co-packer can put every brand it makes into recall.
• Monitor your environment. Listeria swabs in wet and ready-to-eat plants, Salmonella in dry ones, with a written plan for what to do after a positive.
• After any recall, fix the control, not just the lot. The most likely next recall is the same kind as the last one.

To see which of these matter most for your product, try the free Recall Risk Check. Pick your product category, tick what you already do, and it shows which gaps line up with the recalls that actually happen in your category.

About the author

I'm Dr. Bryan Quoc Le, a food scientist and the founder of Mendocino Food Consulting. I've spent more than ten years in food product development, and I'm the author of 150 Food Science Questions Answered. I've worked with companies from early-stage startups to Blue Diamond Growers and The Good Food Institute.

Getting ready to launch, or cleaning up after a recall? Send me your product, your ingredient list and what you have in place at bryan@mendocinofoodconsulting.com, and I'll tell you where I'd focus first. That's the core of my Second Opinion Call.