The Food and Drug Administration sent its retail food specialists into 438 randomly selected grocery store delis between October 2019 and December 2022. In 84 percent of them, specialists saw at least one failure to hold food at a safe time or temperature. In 61.9 percent, an employee did not wash hands when or how the FDA Food Code requires. Those are the two headline findings of the agency’s technical report on foodborne illness risk factors in retail food store delis, published in August 2026 and reported this week by Food Safety News.
I read reports like this one differently than most people do. I represented the family of a man who died in the NetCost Market deli outbreak, and dozens of people in the Boar’s Head deli meat outbreak. I have sat with those families.
Why this report is personal
The NetCost outbreak ran from April 2021 to September 2022, inside the same window FDA was observing delis. CDC counted 16 people sick in six states. Of the 14 with information, 13 were hospitalized. One woman lost her pregnancy, and one death was reported, from Maryland. My client, a New Yorker, was one of the 16, and his Listeria was a whole genome sequencing match to the outbreak strain. He fell ill after eating deli products bought at two NetCost locations and died nearly a year later, too late to be included in CDC’s death count. Official outbreak numbers are a floor, not a ceiling.
New York officials found the outbreak strain in environmental samples from a NetCost deli in Brooklyn, in open packages of mortadella and ham sliced there, and in salami a sick person bought at a NetCost deli on Staten Island. The Brooklyn deli closed, was deep-cleaned and reopened after testing came back clean. In September 2022, the outbreak strain was found in that same deli again. CDC never identified a single deli or food as the source and concluded that a contaminated food likely carried the strain into delis in several states.
Two years later came Boar’s Head. CDC said in August 2024 that it had become the largest listeriosis outbreak since the 2011 Jensen Farms cantaloupe outbreak, in which I represented the families of all 33 people who died. CDC’s final count was 61 people sick in 19 states, 60 hospitalized and 10 dead. The people I represented in that outbreak included families of people who died.
Neither outbreak appears in FDA’s report, which names no deli and counts no illnesses. But when I read that 39.3 percent of delis did not properly clean and sanitize food-contact surfaces, I think of a Brooklyn deli where the outbreak strain turned up again after a deep cleaning.
What FDA measured
The visits were unannounced but voluntary and non-regulatory, and averaged about 101 minutes. Specialists scored ten Food Code practices grouped under four risk factors: poor personal hygiene, contaminated equipment, improper holding time and temperature, and inadequate cooking. A deli was marked out of compliance on a practice if a specialist saw it fail even once. FDA is careful to say that does not mean the practice failed every time.
This is the second of three rounds in FDA’s current Retail Food Risk Factor Study. The baseline round ran from 2015 to 2016, and the third runs from October 2026 through September 2027. FDA says it will not report trends until the third round is complete.
What FDA found
Holding food at the right time and temperature was the worst-controlled risk factor. Cold holding failed in 58.9 percent of delis, hot holding in 44.0 percent, and cooling in 41.9 percent of the delis where cooling could be observed. In 35.8 percent, refrigerated ready-to-eat food was not properly date-marked or discarded within seven days.
Personal hygiene came next at 61.9 percent, all of it from handwashing. In 55.7 percent of delis, someone failed to wash at a required time, and in 27.6 percent, someone washed improperly. Bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food, by contrast, turned up in only 1.4 percent.
Contaminated equipment was found in 52.7 percent of delis. Food-contact surfaces were not properly cleaned and sanitized in 39.3 percent, and food was not protected from cross-contamination in 31.1 percent.
Cooking was the best-controlled risk factor, out of compliance in 9.3 percent of the 344 delis where it was observed. Only 37 of the 438 delis, 8.4 percent, had no failures on any of the ten practices. The median deli had three.
Why these failures matter for Listeria
FDA notes that most deli food is ready-to-eat and gets no cooking step to kill pathogens before it is eaten. The report does not test food for bacteria or count illnesses, and it does not tie any failure to any outbreak. Still, the practices that failed most often, including cold holding, sanitizing food-contact surfaces, and date-marking and discarding ready-to-eat food, are the practices that matter most for Listeria monocytogenes, which CDC warns can grow on food kept in the refrigerator. After the 2024 outbreak, CDC told businesses to follow USDA-FSIS best practices for controlling Listeria in deli areas.
What made delis safer
The strongest predictor of good performance was a well-developed food safety management system, meaning written procedures, training and monitoring. Delis with no such system averaged 4.37 failures. Delis with a well-developed, documented system averaged 1.95. FDA’s model estimates about 19 percent fewer failures for each one-point improvement on its four-point management scale.
Certified food protection managers helped, mostly by building those systems. Delis where a certified manager was the person in charge had an average management score of 2.87, compared with 2.27 where no certified manager was employed. Certification alone was not a significant predictor once management systems were taken into account.
Local rules mattered too. Delis in jurisdictions that required food handler training averaged 2.42 failures, compared with 3.19 where training was not required. Jurisdictions that graded establishments or required inspection results to be posted publicly also had fewer failures. Chain delis, which made up 95.2 percent of the sample, were far more likely to have well-developed management systems (47.6 percent) than single-store delis (9.5 percent).
One finding cuts the other way. More than three-quarters of the delis were in jurisdictions enrolled in FDA’s voluntary retail Program Standards, yet 67.9 percent of those jurisdictions did not meet Standard 1, the basic regulatory foundation. FDA’s supplemental analysis also found fewer failures in delis located in jurisdictions that were not enrolled. The report states that result without explaining it.
What the report cannot tell us
Participation was voluntary, delis under legal notice were excluded, and no deli is named, so the numbers may understate the problem. FDA did not measure whether food came from a safe source. The report is also internally inconsistent in one spot: it first attributes the holding failures to cold holding and cooling, then to cold holding and hot holding.
Timing is the larger problem. FDA announced the 2015-2016 deli report in May 2021. The 2019-2022 report arrived in August 2026, nearly four years after its data collection ended. Every observation in it predates the 2024 outbreak, so it says nothing about how delis changed afterward.
What should happen now
Deli operators do not need to wait for the next round. FDA released companion calls to action for industry and regulators that focus on using management systems to improve handwashing. The report’s own data point the same direction: write the procedures down, train to them, and check that they are followed.
State and local officials can require food handler training and public posting of inspection results, both associated with fewer failures in this study. FDA can report the third round far faster than it reported the first two. A trend line that arrives years late cannot help the families of people who get sick in the meantime.
People at higher risk, including pregnant women, adults 65 and older and anyone with a weakened immune system, should follow CDC’s advice to avoid deli meat or reheat it to an internal temperature of 165°F or until steaming hot.
Quick answers
What did FDA’s 2019-2022 deli study find? In 438 grocery store delis, 84 percent had at least one lapse in holding food at a safe time or temperature, and 61.9 percent had at least one handwashing lapse. Cooking was the best-controlled risk factor.
Is deli meat safe to eat? For most healthy people, illness from deli meat is uncommon. For pregnant women, adults 65 and older and people with weakened immune systems, CDC advises avoiding deli meat or heating it until steaming hot, because Listeria can cause severe illness.
What makes a deli safer? In FDA’s data, the biggest difference came from written food safety procedures, staff training and routine monitoring, backed by a certified food protection manager in charge.
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