Newsweek reported this morning, in a piece by Aliss Higham, that a new GS1 US survey of 1,000 U.S. adults found 94 percent concerned about the frequency of food recalls, up from 93 percent in 2025 (Newsweek, September 7, 2026). The headline number is not the one that should worry the food industry. The number underneath it is: the share of Americans who believe recalls are effective at protecting public health and safety fell from 85 percent to 80 percent in a single year. People are not only worried about how often food gets pulled off the shelf. They are losing confidence that pulling it off the shelf accomplishes anything.
The behavior numbers in the GS1 US release are worse. Sixty-seven percent said they had avoided an entire food category after a recall, up from 60 percent last year. Sixty-six percent said they were hesitant to buy the same product or brand again, up from 59 percent. Fifty-nine percent said they had thrown out recalled food even when their own state was not affected. Among women, 71 percent said they had walked away from a whole category, against 63 percent of men. Only 9 percent said they would never buy a recalled brand again, which is the most revealing figure in the set. This is not shoppers punishing one company. It is shoppers backing away from an aisle.
GS1 US is the barcode and data standards organization, and it has a position: it wants the FSMA Section 204 traceability rule implemented and 2D barcodes adopted. It does not make the numbers wrong, and I agree with where GS1 lands on traceability.
Six other surveys this year found the same thing.
Quinnipiac surveyed 963 registered voters from July 23 through July 27, in the last full week of the worst summer of foodborne illness in three decades, and asked about confidence in government oversight of food safety. Twelve percent said a lot and 31 percent said some. Twenty-five percent said not so much and 30 percent said none at all. Thirty percent of American voters have no confidence at all, and that is the number I would tape to the wall.
Gallup has asked about confidence in the federal government to ensure the safety of the food supply since 1999. It ran near eight in ten from 1999 through 2006 and about seven in ten from the 2007 Salmonellaoutbreak through 2019, when it was 68 percent. It fell to 57 percent in 2024 and 53 percent in July 2025, the lowest in the twenty-six years Gallup has asked. In 2024, 37 percent said they had thrown out or returned food over a recall or advisory and 53 percent said they had avoided certain brands or types of food. The 2026 wave was fielded in July, during this outbreak, and has not published.
The International Food Information Council, which is industry funded, has tracked confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply since 2012, when it stood at 78 percent. It was 70 percent in 2023, 62 percent in 2024 and 55 percent in 2025. KFF found in April that 46 percent of voters approve of the administration’s handling of food policy, and that voters split 31 to 27 on whether they trust Democrats or Republicans to keep food additives and pesticides safe, with 31 percent trusting neither. Navigator Research found in May that 51 percent are confident their food is safe and 46 percent are not, and that when asked who is to blame, 46 percent named large food corporations, 46 percent named chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and 4 percent named farmers. A new Word In Black survey published this month found more than 60 percent of Black Americans reporting concerns about the nation’s food safety.
Two qualifications, because I want this right. The collapse is in confidence in government, not in the food itself. Gallup asks separately whether the food sold in most grocery stores is safe to eat, and that number stood at 73 percent in 2025, against 72 percent the year before, though both are down from 81 percent in 2019. And a good share of the decline in confidence in government is partisan rather than parasitic. Gallup attributes much of the 2024-to-2025 drop to Democrats reacting to a change of administration, and that reading was taken a year before this summer. The Quinnipiac number is a single question with no trend line behind it, the last of thirty-three in a survey otherwise about the war with Iran.
Here is what federal officials were saying while that polling was in the field.
On August 11, Kyle Diamantas, the acting FDA Commissioner, went on CNBC and said, “We have the safest food supply in the world. Full stop”. He said Americans should feel confident eating fresh produce including leafy greens, and he told the network, “Americans should have full confidence in the food supply in this country”. HHS, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs, posted the same day that “Cyclospora: contained, American food: safe”. Diamantas allowed that the outbreak had made people more aware of foodborne illness. He did not say what the agency was doing to keep the food safe in the first place.
Diamantas, a lawyer by training and formerly the Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods, has been acting Commissioner since Marty Makary resigned on May 12. The President nominated Heidi Overton for the permanent job on August 19, and she has not been confirmed.
The claim has a factual basis. That is not the same as it being an answer.
FDA has made a version of this claim for years, and it is not made up. In 2022 Commissioner Robert Califf wrote an FDA Voices piece pointing to the Economist’s Global Food Security Index, where the United States ranked joint first on the food safety indicator. Three things about that index. It is sponsored by Corteva Agriscience, an agricultural inputs company. The 2022 report was its eleventh edition and, as far as I can find, its last, which makes the evidence four years old. And in that same edition the United States ranked thirteenth of 113 countries overall. Note the wording too. Califf wrote that we have one of the safest food supplies in the world. Diamantas said the safest, full stop. Meanwhile the standing CDC estimate has not moved: roughly 48 million Americans get sick from food every year, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die.
Public opinion cannot refute a safety claim. The illness numbers can.
CDC’s case data page, updated September 1, counts 18,445 laboratory-confirmed domestically acquired cyclosporiasis cases between May 1 and August 31, with 990 hospitalizations, two deaths and cases in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The comparable figure for the same stretch of 2025 was 1,180. The iceberg lettuce outbreak that CDC and FDA have tied to Taylor Farms de Mexico accounts for 11,458 of those illnesses, 495 hospitalizations and both deaths, across 20 states. That leaves roughly 7,000 confirmed cases this summer with no food named at all. At the same time, an FDA investigation of Salmonella in jalapeños sourced from Mexico has reached 431 illnesses in 32 states with 57 hospitalizations.
Newsweek also carried a Trace One analysis of FDA and USDA data putting total recalls at 505 in 2021 and 613 in 2025, a 21.4 percent increase, with Class I recalls, the ones for products most likely to hurt someone, up 36.4 percent. Third-party recall tallies vary depending on whether you count events or products, so treat the trend rather than the decimal. The trend is up.
What moves these numbers is not messaging.
Ninety-four percent concern and 30 percent no-confidence-at-all are not a communications failure. They are an accurate read of a summer in which tens of thousands of people got sick, most of them will never be told what they ate, and the traceability rule written to answer exactly that question has been pushed to July 20, 2028. Growers and processors should be testing agricultural water and finished product for the pathogens that actually turn up in leafy greens, and publishing what they find. The buyers who lost sales this summer should write those tests into their supplier specifications and refuse product from anyone who will not run them. That is what the beef buyers did after 1993, once USDA declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994, and it worked. I wrote about the produce aisle side of this last week, in Shoppers Are Walking Past the Produce Aisle.
Telling people the food supply is the safest in the world, while roughly 7,000 of them have a confirmed parasite and no explanation, does not restore confidence. It spends it. The polling is not consumers being irrational. It is consumers keeping score.
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