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On March 2, Trader Joe’s announced a chicken soup dumpling recall because the products were potentially contaminated with plastic fragments of permanent marker. It’s hardly the first time something like this has happened and not even the first time it’s happened this year.
In early February, the company recalled a frozen pilaf meal due to the possible presence of foreign material (maybe rocks?). And last summer, it announced recalls for cookies, broccoli-cheddar soup, falafel, and crackers due to the possibility they were contaminated with insects, rocks, or metal.
It’s “really very problematic” for the company, said Melvin Kramer, a food safety expert and president of the EHA environmental and public health consulting group, when we spoke to him about the 2023 recalls last August. It’s also a concerning reminder for consumers about the fallibility of mechanisms meant to ensure our food supply doesn’t cause disease (or in this case, tooth breakages and what Kramer calls “the yuck factor”).
In all cases, it appears Trader Joe’s issued the recalls voluntarily, as most companies do in the case of a contaminated food product: The US government’s oversight system leaves a lot of food safety assurance in the hands of private companies. Companies are incentivized to get ahead of food safety concerns — rather than wait for the government to shut them down — to maintain consumer confidence and profitability. But the more globalized our food system becomes, the harder it gets to ensure its safety.
It’s not clear why so many of these recalls have happened so close together, and to what extent globalization and the relative lack of federal food oversight have played in the goods’ contamination. But when there is a recall, one of those issues is often the culprit.
“You could say it’s bad luck,” Kramer said. In a statement to Vox last summer, Trader Joe’s said the cluster of recalls back then was “a coincidence.” But another possibility, said Kramer, is that the same features that make Trader Joe’s products so appealing to so many people — essentially, its blend of global and local foods made by small-batch producers — raise its risk of running into more safety problems compared with grocery stores that only source food from large-scale producers.
A US food retailer with more than 500 stores nationwide, Trader Joe’s has earned cult status among many Americans for selling taste-bud-thrilling, local specialty foods on a massive scale — and for telling compelling stories about its brands in unusually shrewd, zeitgeisty ways. (How many grocery stores have a branded podcast that’s actually good?)
But in the context of the US’s somewhat porous food safety system, the grocer’s embrace of idiosyncratic tastes means recalls like the latest one are occasionally going to happen.
Author Bio: Keren Landman, MD is a senior reporter covering public health, emerging infectious diseases, the health workforce, and health justice at Vox. Keren is trained as a physician, researcher, and epidemiologist and has served as a disease detective at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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