Large grocery store chains failed recalls

Posted September 2020

Cub Reporters

Many of the largest grocery store chains in Portland failed the PIRGEF last spring, the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund’s test, on notifying consumers of major food recalls.

The Oregonian reported last March what it found on the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Many large local stores failed state health inspections, including Safeway , Quality Food Centers, and Fubonn Supermarkets. These stores failed to properly notify customers about major and minor food recalls, most receiving an F grade. Out of the 26 stores inspected, four passed with a C grade, the highest grade any store earned.

Albertsons, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and Whole Foods, some of the biggest grocery store chains in Oregon, all received scores lower than 50%, and all neglected to provide individual recall policies to the public and to PIRGEF. None of these stores have transparent programs to directly notify customers or tell customers where they can find recall notices.

“The vast majority of surveyed stores did not provide customers a document or webpage that explained the store’s process for notifying consumers of recalls,” stated PIRGEF on uspirg.org.

Even though contaminated food is being recalled and taken off the shelves, consumers are continuing to contract illnesses from foods they purchased before a recall was initiated.

“While our food safety system has improved since the passage of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in 2011, 48 million Americans continue to become sick from the food they eat every year,” stated a PIRGEF representative. “Frozen or non-perishable items such as meat, flour or crackers, often remain unconsumed for weeks or months. Meat, for instance, can be safely stored for months in the freezer. Consumers could continue to get sick from products that have been recalled for weeks because they purchased them before the recall was initiated.”

Unfortunately, modern-day society mainly relies on mass media to spread the news about major food recalls instead of the places where the food in question is being sold.

“Our current recall system usually succeeds at removing contaminated food from store shelves, but inadequately alerts consumers that they may have hazardous food they’ve already purchased,” stated a PIRGEF representative. “Mostly, consumers find out about recalls through news coverage. But in a fragmented media system whose 24/7 news cycle often forces important public health alerts to the bottom of the news, many never hear about a recall. And smaller recalls may never receive any coverage.”

Regardless, many consumers don’t expect information about food recalls to come from the news.

“Consumers are more likely to expect the store where they buy their food [to] alert them if it has been recalled than the producer, who they do not directly interact [with],” stated a PIRGEF representative. “And in some cases the recall is so expansive or vague that consumers cannot easily identify the product without assistance.”

This makes it difficult for consumers to know what foods have been recalled because they are not being told by the stores where the foods were bought.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable that the stores aren’t notifying customers,” said sophomore Connor Wall. “It’s really scary to think that a lot of the stores my family shops at aren’t telling us about food recalls.”

Until recently, it was very hard to come across public information about food recalls since there was no access to it online in Oregon, unlike other states where that information was readily available. However, thanks to new online records from the Oregon Department of Agriculture, that data is now available on the ODA’s website and is easily accessible at oregon.gov in the food safety program.