On October 1, 2026, Gias Foods, Inc. of New York expanded its recall of bettergoods Authentic Italian Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine to every lot code, because the frozen pasta may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. The first recall, posted September 15, covered two lots. Sixteen days later it covers all of them.
The product is a 22-ounce yellow plastic bag of frozen fettuccine, UPC 194346442706, sold nationwide at Walmart under the retailer’s bettergoods private label. The September notice named lot L6079C with an expiration date of 09/19/2027 and lot L6080C with an expiration date of 09/20/2027, both stamped on the back of the bag. Those numbers no longer matter. Any bag with that UPC is recalled, whatever the lot or the date. No illnesses have been reported. Consumers are told to return the product to the place of purchase for a full refund. The company is taking questions at sales@giasfoods.com, and the September notice listed Gianluca Morrone at 917-675-4890.
Two state laboratories found it, on opposite sides of the country
This recall did not start with the company’s own testing. It started with routine sampling by the Washington State Department of Agriculture and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, whose testing indicated that finished product may carry the organism. That is surveillance sampling doing its job: a state inspector pulls a bag of frozen pasta, a state laboratory cultures it, and a product nobody was watching turns out to be a problem.
The notice names two agencies on opposite coasts as the source of the finding. It does not say whether each laboratory found the organism on its own, or whether they hit the same lot or different lots. Those are fair questions, because the answers bear on how widely the contamination was distributed before anyone noticed.
Going from two lots to all of them is the part that should get your attention
The September 15 notice described a narrow problem: two consecutive lot numbers with consecutive expiration dates, a day or two of production. The October 1 notice describes no boundary at all — every lot code, no date range, no production window. The reason for the expansion is not given. The new notice repeats the September language word for word: the company has stopped distributing the product while “FDA and the company continue their investigation as to what caused the problem.”
Recalls grow from specific lots to every lot when the investigation can no longer confine the contamination to a production day. In practice that usually means one of two things: more product has tested positive, or the organism has turned up in the plant environment somewhere it could reach any lot. Sometimes it simply means the company cannot say which lots are clean. Which of those happened here, the notice does not say. It would help to know. It would also help to know whether the line that makes this product is still running, because stopping shipments is not the same as fixing the place the shipments came from.
The name on the bag is Walmart’s; the name on the recall is not
bettergoods is Walmart’s private label, launched April 30, 2024 as what the retailer called its largest private-brand food launch in twenty years — 300 items sourced from suppliers around the world. The shopper sees Walmart’s brand on the front of the bag and a Walmart UPC on the back. The company answering for the pasta is a name on an FDA web page, and the only thing connecting the two is that twelve-digit UPC.
Gias Foods, Inc. of New York is the U.S. consignee for shipments from Gias S.p.A. of Mongrassano, in Calabria, according to U.S. customs shipping records. Gias is a frozen ready-meal manufacturer founded by Antonio Tenuta in the 1970s, credited in Italy with developing the “Quattro Salti in Padella” frozen skillet meals for Findus, and today a private-label supplier that sells to retailers through group companies in other countries. The recall notice does not say where this fettuccine was made. The front of the bag says “Authentic Italian.” If the answer is Italy, then Gias Foods is the importer, and under FDA’s Foreign Supplier Verification Program it is the party responsible for verifying that its supplier controls Listeria. What that verification consisted of is a fair question.
Walmart’s private labels have been here before this year. On August 12, Kettle Cuisine of Savage, Maryland recalled 3,240 Marketside Tomato Bisque Soup Kits sold exclusively at Walmart stores in 29 states after its own testing produced a presumptive positive for Listeria. Different maker, different plant, different product. What the two share is the retailer’s label on the front and a Walmart UPC on the back.
Frozen does not mean safe, and heating it is not the fix
Freezing stops Listeria from growing. It does not kill it. A bag of this fettuccine with a September 2027 date can sit at the back of a freezer for a year and come out carrying the same bacteria it went in with. That is the practical problem with this recall. Walmart can clear its freezer cases in a day. The product that matters is already in people’s homes, and it will keep turning up there well into next year.
The instinct with a frozen pasta is to figure the heat will take care of it. Thorough cooking does kill Listeria. But FDA’s compliance policy on the organism defines ready-to-eat to include any food that “reasonably appears to be suitable for consumption without cooking” — a bag of frozen pasta with heating directions sits squarely inside it — and those directions are not a validated kill step. Microwaves heat unevenly. A frozen block in a skillet is hot on the outside long before the center gets there. And the handling comes first: opening the bag, breaking up the frozen pasta, rinsing the pot, wiping the counter. That is how a contaminated product seeds a kitchen. Do not cook it. Return it or throw it out, and clean the shelf it sat on.
“No illnesses reported” means nothing yet
Listeria is slow. Symptoms of invasive listeriosis can begin anywhere from the day of exposure to ten weeks later, and the illness is often not diagnosed until someone is sick enough to be hospitalized and cultured. The two original lots were on sale before September 15. The rest have been on sale for as long as Walmart has carried the product. Anyone who ate this pasta in September is still inside the window. If the isolates from those state samples have been sequenced and uploaded to the national databases, as is routine, any human case with a matching genome will be flagged — and this stops being a recall and starts being an outbreak.
The people at risk are pregnant women and their newborns, adults 65 and older, and anyone with a weakened immune system — cancer treatment, a transplant, dialysis, diabetes, HIV. Healthy adults get fever, muscle aches, headache, nausea and diarrhea, and usually recover. In the high-risk groups the infection moves into the bloodstream and the brain. In pregnancy, the mother may feel like she has a mild flu while the infection ends the pregnancy or delivers a critically ill infant.
What to do now
- Check the freezer for a 22-ounce yellow bag of bettergoods Authentic Italian Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine, UPC 194346442706. Every lot and every date is recalled.
- Do not eat it and do not cook it. Return it to Walmart for a full refund, or throw it away in a sealed bag.
- Clean and sanitize the freezer shelf and anything the bag touched.
- If you ate it and develop fever, muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, confusion or diarrhea in the next ten weeks, see a doctor and say the words “possible Listeria exposure.” If you are pregnant and have any fever at all, call today.
In thirty-plus years of foodborne illness litigation, the Listeria cases stand apart — the families of all 33 people who died in the 2011 Jensen Farms cantaloupe outbreak, dozens of people sickened in the 2024 Boar’s Head deli meat outbreak, and clients in outbreaks tied to ice cream, celery and leafy greens. The thread running through every one of them is a plant where the organism had settled in long before anyone got sick. A recall that goes from two lots to every lot in sixteen days, with a notice that still says the cause is under investigation, is a company and an agency telling you they have not yet found where it lives. Until they do, the only safe bag of this pasta is the one that went back to the store.
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