NatureBest Recalled Eighteen Pico de Gallos, Diced Jalapeños and Stuffed Mushrooms Made with the Coast Citrus Peppers. HEB Announced It on August 8. FDA Posted It Today.

NatureBest Precut & Produce LLC, a processor with plants in Missouri City and Houston, Texas, has recalled eighteen refrigerated products made with jalapeño peppers it bought from Coast Citrus Distributors — the San Diego importer at the center of a Salmonella Javiana outbreak that has now sickened 345 people in twenty-seven states. The products went to retail customers in Texas and Louisiana between July 3 and August 5. They carry two brands: NatureBest and H-E-B.

What is on the list is refrigerator food — pico de gallo in mild, medium, hot and mango, in four-ounce, nine-ounce and fourteen-ounce tubs, plus diced jalapeños, a fifty-eight-ounce soup mix, and two kinds of stuffed mushrooms. The Best By and Use By dates run from July 12 through August 15, 2026. Read that last date again. Two of the four-ounce pico rows are dated August 13 through August 15, which means the recall was published on FDA’s website while the product was still inside its own date on somebody’s shelf.

The company’s announcement is dated August 8. FDA published it on August 14. In the six days between those two dates FDA published the Taylor Fresh Foods recall on August 9 and the Whole Foods Market recall on August 12, and updated its outbreak advisory twice, on August 10 and again on August 13. Neither update mentions NatureBest, and as of this morning the advisory still does not list it. Nobody at a desk did this on purpose. It is what a paper pipeline looks like when the product it describes has a two-week shelf life — six days is most of the life of a tub of pico de gallo, and the notice arrived on the far end of it.

Here is the full list.

If you have any of it, do not eat it. Throw it out or take it back to the store for a refund. NatureBest’s consumer line is (713) 278-0425, Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Central, and the company’s email is sales@naturebestprecut.com. Then wash and sanitize the shelf, the drawer and anything the tub leaked onto. Pico de gallo sits in its own liquid, and that liquid moves.

Read the UPC, not the front of the package. Six of the eighteen rows say H-E-B on the label. A shopper who picked up an H-E-B Pico De Gallo Medium has no reason to know that a company called NatureBest made it, and no reason to go looking for a NatureBest recall. The number that ties the tub in your hand to this list is the twelve digits on the back.

The lot codes look like gibberish and are not. They run 190A26184 through 190A26216, and the last three digits are the day of the year — 184 is July 3 and 216 is August 4, which lines up with the July 3 to August 5 distribution window the company gives. Most of the rows simply list that full range, which is to say every production day in the window. The practical rule for a consumer is simpler than the codes: if you have one of these products and you bought it in July or the first week of August, treat it as recalled.

The table has the same kind of defects the other notices in this outbreak have had. NatureBest Mild Pico, UPC 089563002065, is printed twice — once with the full lot range and a Best By window ending August 7, and once with thirteen specific lot codes and a window ending August 11. The mild, medium and mango versions of the H-E-B pico give the full lot range while the hot version lists twenty-two individual codes, for no reason a reader can see. Two different UPCs both appear as NatureBest Pico De Gallo Mild in a four-ounce cup. None of that is fatal, and all of it costs a worried shopper time at the refrigerator door.

Salmonella usually shows up twelve to seventy-two hours after the contaminated food, and lasts four to seven days: diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps. Children under five, older adults, and people with weakened immune systems get the worst of it. If you are sick, ask your doctor for a stool culture and ask that any isolate be sent to the state public health lab for sequencing. That is not a formality. This outbreak is 345 people because 345 people were cultured and sequenced. Everyone else who got sick is a number nobody has.

The outbreak itself: 345 confirmed illnesses in twenty-seven states, thirty-six hospitalizations, no deaths, with illness onsets from June 19 to July 20. Of 191 people interviewed, 177 — ninety-three percent — had eaten at a Mexican-style restaurant, and CDC has identified twenty-seven illness clusters at Chipotle and QDOBA locations in seven states. FDA’s traceback landed on a single grower in Sinaloa, Mexico. The agency has still not published that grower’s name.

A word of fairness to NatureBest, because it matters and because it will matter to the next company on this list. NatureBest bought a contaminated ingredient, the same as Taylor Farms did, and Whole Foods, and the Albertsons banners. Every one of them is downstream of the same peppers. No illness has been publicly tied to any NatureBest product. What is different here is the calendar: the Taylor Farms items carried dates that began after the last illness onset, so that recall was precautionary in the cleanest sense, while this distribution window opens July 3 — inside the stretch when people were getting sick. That is worth saying plainly and worth not overstating.

Two things remain true this morning that were true a week ago. FDA’s advisory still says, under the heading for stores affected, that Coast Citrus does not appear to supply jalapeños directly to grocery stores. Sitting on FDA’s own recall page a few clicks away is a recall of H-E-B branded pico de gallo made from those peppers. And six days after FDA announced that Coast Citrus had agreed to recall, there is still no Coast Citrus recall notice anywhere — not on FDA’s recall page, not on the advisory, not from the company. Everything the public knows about where those peppers went, it has learned from the companies that bought them.

Count it up. Twenty products from Taylor Fresh Foods, eighteen more on the USDA public health alert, forty-three from Whole Foods, four and then fifty-nine from the Albertsons banners, and now eighteen from NatureBest. That is 162 individual grocery items pulled off shelves because of a recall the importer has never publicly announced.

Check your refrigerator tonight, and check the UPC and not the brand. Keep the receipt. And if you ate one of these and you have been sick, the number that decides whether you are counted is not printed on the package — it comes back from a lab, and only if somebody orders the test.