If you want to know which jalapeño products have actually been pulled from store shelves in the Salmonella Javiana outbreak, there is exactly one place to find them gathered in one spot. It is not fda.gov. It is not a press release from the company doing the recalling. It is eFoodAlert, where Phyllis Entis spent Saturday going retailer by retailer and building the list herself.
Here is what she turned up. Costco has pulled Coast Tropical jalapeño peppers in five-pound bags, item #514606, sold between July 13 and August 5 out of its Dallas and Stafford business centers — and the same item number under an entirely different label, Todd’s Quality Tomatoes, sold out of Orlando between July 23 and August 5. Brookshire’s, Fresh by Brookshire’s, Spring Market and Super 1 Foods have pulled Nature’s Best pico de gallo in medium and mild — four-ounce, fourteen-ounce and sold by the pound, every date code — along with BGC guacamole sold by the pound. Stop & Shop has pulled a seven-ounce pico de gallo and an eleven-ounce chicken tortilla wrap. Six chains. Product names, sizes, item numbers, date ranges. A list a person standing in their own kitchen can actually use.
Now set that against the official record. CDC counts 345 people infected across 27 states, 36 of them hospitalized, no deaths, with illness onsets running June 19 through July 20. Of 191 people interviewed, 177 had eaten at a Mexican-style restaurant, Chipotle and QDOBA among them. FDA’s traceback landed on a single grower in Sinaloa, Mexico, supplying Coast Citrus Distributors of San Diego. Chipotle switched jalapeño suppliers on July 20. QDOBA stopped serving them July 28. Both agencies say there is no ongoing risk from those restaurants, and both agencies last touched their outbreak pages days ago. The 345 has not moved since August 5, which tells you nothing except that it takes three to four weeks to tie a new case to an outbreak. The number is going up.
The recall is where this gets hard to defend. Coast Citrus agreed to recall the remaining implicated product and is identifying and contacting its affected customers. That is the whole of it. The company has issued no public recall notice — nothing on its own site, nothing pushed out to the press, no lot codes, no consignee list, no photographs of the bags. FDA has told the public that Coast Citrus does not appear to supply jalapeños directly to grocery stores, and that it is still working to determine whether the peppers reached retail at all.
Six supermarket chains answered that question on their own websites while the agency was still working on it.
Be fair about the details, because the details still cut the same way. Costco’s business centers serve restaurants and food service, so bagged peppers moving through them is not, strictly, a grocery-store sale. But pico de gallo in a four-ounce cup, guacamole sold by the pound and an eleven-ounce chicken wrap are consumer retail products, sold to consumers, off retail shelves. The peppers reached the public through further processors, and the processors’ customers figured that out before the federal government did. Whatever the technically correct answer is to whether Coast Citrus supplies grocery stores, the practical answer to whether these peppers ended up in grocery stores is yes, and it has been yes for days.
Look closely at the Costco entries and you will see the other problem. One item number, #514606, two different brand names, two different regional distribution centers. That is repacking. Peppers came in from one Sinaloa grower and went out under whatever label the next company in the chain put on the bag. It is precisely the scenario that lot-level traceability records were designed to untangle, under the FSMA 204 food traceability rule — the rule FDA has pushed down the road. Without those records, tracing a pepper from a Sinaloa field to a tub of pico de gallo in East Texas is archaeology, and it gets done retroactively, by phone, weeks after the peppers were eaten.
So the grower is identified but unnamed. The recalling company has issued nothing the public can read. The lot codes do not exist in any public form. CDC is telling businesses to check their inventory for “recalled” jalapeño peppers, and FDA is telling consumers to throw out peppers if they are unsure who they came from — which, absent codes or a consignee list, is every consumer in America. That is not a recall communication. That is an agency describing a recall to people who have no way to act on the description.
I have been making the same argument in the Cyclospora outbreak for a month, and it is the same argument I have been making since 1993. The information that lets people protect themselves exists. Somebody has it. The question is only whether it gets released, and to whom, and how fast. Here the answer was that it got released in fragments, onto six separate corporate webpages, in six different formats, with nobody in government assembling it — until a food safety microbiologist and author sat down on a Saturday and did the assembling for free.
Phyllis Entis has been doing this for years, quietly and accurately, and the food safety world is better for it. Read her post. Subscribe to her blog. Buy her books.
But understand what it means that her post is the best public document in this outbreak. A recall system that depends on one person with a laptop and a Saturday is not a system. It is a hobby that a lot of people’s health happens to ride on.
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