Crumbs — that's a big recall

By Janette Woodhouse
Tuesday, 13 June, 2017

Mislabelling by a single breadcrumb supplier has led to recalls of 1.398 million kilos of food in the US.

A week ago an unnamed US breadcrumb supplier advised its clients that its crumbs had been incorrectly labelled and that they did contain milk products. Since then nine manufacturers have issued recalls of the products they made that incorporated the breadcrumbs as they were in contravention of labelling laws because milk was not declared on their product labels.

Company	Quantity recalled	Products recalled
Conagra Brands	717,338 pounds	spaghetti and meatball products
Pork King Sausage	44,035 pounds	raw sausage link products
Advance Pierre Foods	54,699 pounds	chicken products
Aldon Food Corporation	18,570 pounds	chicken salad
Maid-Rite Specialty Foods	174,000 pounds	various beef products
Packer Avenue Foods	9690 pounds	ready-to-eat (RTE) chicken salad
Gourmet Boutique LLC	294,744 pounds	ready-to-eat (RTE) chicken products
Tyson Foods	2,485,374 pounds	ready-to-eat (RTE) breaded chicken products
Water Lilies Food	4335 pounds	ready-to-eat breaded chicken products

The fact that these nine companies are faced with managing the recalls and the resultant loss of credibility because of their supplier’s error while the breadcrumb supplier can remain basically anonymous seems unreasonable.

I realise that there will be a wash of court cases from the breadcrumb users and losses will ultimately be recovered, but it is still a pretty tough position they find themselves in. Yes, they could have tested their incoming breadcrumbs for the presence of milk but this is like the horse-meat substitution scandal — how much testing does a company need to do to establish that what shouldn’t be in a product isn’t there?