14 Massive Pasta Recalls Throughout US History

Yahoo

23-03-2025

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As store-bought food goes, pasta is one of the most reliable items out there. However, when you think about it a little more closely, there's a lot of scope for things to go wrong. There are countless pasta products on the market, with many of them containing a large amount of ingredients and going through a pretty significant level of processing. With every step along the way to a pasta product being made, and with every additional item put in it, the chance of a recall gets bigger -- and because pasta is so popular, when a recall does occur, it generally happens on a big scale.
Over the years, there have been some massive pasta recalls in the U.S., which have caused disruption to the lives of customers and companies. The reasons for these recalls have run the gamut from contamination from foodborne pathogens, which carry the potential of causing sickness, to unintentionally having physical contaminants like glass and plastic. Some of these big recall events have also been part of even wider recalls that have cost food companies millions of dollars.
Read more: 14 Cheap Fish You Should Always Avoid Buying
When you chomp into a mac and cheese bite, you generally expect to encounter two things: Macaroni and a cheesy sauce. That's not exactly a big ask, right? What you don't expect to happen, though, is to receive a mouthful of metal. Unfortunately, that was a very real risk in February 2025, when Feel Good Foods had to put out a recall notice for its Three Cheese Mac and Cheese Bites. The recall was initiated when the company discovered that metal pieces may have potentially made their way into the bites, posing a potential health risk to any customers eating them.
Not fun, huh? What was even less fun was how many mac and cheese bites might have been affected by the issue. Feel Good Foods had to track down over 4,200 of its cases, each case of which contained nine bites -- meaning that the company has tens of thousands of individual mac and cheese balls that could have been affected. The recall was also complicated by the fact that the mac and cheese bites were sold in stores across the U.S. It's advisable that customers check their freezers for this ongoing recall, for Feel Good Foods Three Cheese Mac and Cheese Bites with best-by dates for June 19 and 20, 2026.
Listeriosis is no joke, folks. Infection from Listeria bacteria can cause mild but unpleasant symptoms like chills, nausea, or diarrhea -- but in more serious cases, it can lead to life-threatening consequences. So it's no surprise that food companies take it very seriously when their food might be contaminated with Listeria, and in 2024 it was the turn of Joseph Epstein Food Enterprises, Inc. to enact a recall for its products. The distributing company had to recall its Hungryroot Ricotta Stuffed Shells and Mama Mancini's Stuffed Shells with Sauce and Mozzarella Cheese, due to potential Listeria contamination in both items.
The size of both recalls was pretty big. Joseph Epstein Food Enterprises, Inc. had to recall more than 1,100 cases of each product, which had been distributed across the country. The good news was that the products hadn't actually made it to supermarket shelves, and the company managed to issue the notice before anyone had bought the items.
When recalls are big, they're really big -- and if you don't believe us on that one, look no further than BrucePac's absolutely enormous 2024 recall of its products. The company issued a recall of almost 12 million pounds of its meat and poultry items, which were intended to be sold to and served by schools, institutions, and restaurants across the United States, as well as retailers. The root cause of the recall was BrucePac's ready-to-eat chicken, which had been found to be contaminated with Listeria bacteria. Luckily, while nobody became ill because of consuming these products, things could have been disastrous.
The amount of products that BrucePac had to recall was absolutely huge, and a large number of its affected items were pasta products. Items like its Peak Refuel Chicken Alfredo Pasta, its 7-Eleven Chicken Caesar Pasta Salad, and its H-E-B Hatch Chile Salad with Chicken all had to be tracked down and withdrawn from shelves. This recall just goes to show how big one company's output can be, and how much a single ingredient can affect a huge amount of items.
When you're buying a processed food product, you expect it to be inspected pretty thoroughly. After all, we're well into the 21st century here, so it's not exactly unreasonable to assume that there's someone in the factory checking these items over, right? Unfortunately, though, sometimes products manage to slip out without being properly inspected, which is exactly what happened in 2013 to roughly 25,000 pounds of pasta products made by Real Pasta Inc. The company had to recall multiple stuffed pasta items sold under a dozen brand names because somehow it had left a factory that had recently lost its federal grant of inspection, meaning that it could have been unfit for consumption.
Things were made even more complicated and risky by the fact that some of the products also had the wrong information on their packaging. Several of the recalled items were missing soy from their allergen labels, which posed a huge risk to any individuals with a soy allergy. Thankfully, nobody became seriously ill as a result of eating these items, but this recall was clear evidence of how important it is to regulate the output of processed foods.
Milk may be a common ingredient in pasta dishes, but if it's not listed in the ingredients for something, it's only fair you don't expect it to be in there ... Right? Well, back in 2017, milk ended up in a pasta dish where it really didn't belong, resulting in a huge recall. Conagra Brands had to recall well over 700,000 pounds of its canned spaghetti and meatball products because they contained milk that wasn't on any of their product labels. This created a notable hazard for folks who had milk allergies, who may have eaten the products without realizing it was inside.
Apparently, the milk may have entered the items in the breadcrumbs used in them, presumably as a binder for the meatballs. Conagra Brands was lucky that nobody seemed to become ill as a result of its misbranded products, but it still had to do the hard graft of recalling all those cans. The problem was that they had been shipped pretty much everywhere. The cans were sold under multiple different brand names, and had been sent all around the country, making tracking them down a rather big job for the company.
When you're stuck for an evening meal, frozen pasta has always got your back. Bags of frozen pasta from places like Trader Joe's are a standby, but we generally expect them to be safe to eat -- which customers couldn't entirely trust back in 2023. Mrs. Pasta had to recall thousands of pounds of its frozen stuffed pasta products after it transpired that they hadn't been inspected in the appropriate manner. The issue was that the pasta had been shipped with the official USDA mark of inspection, but upon closer inspection, it had an establishment number that was different from the facility it was made in. As a result, the actual terms of its inspection were unclear, and a recall had to be put out.
Mr. Pasta was helped by the fact that the products were only shipped to one state, Florida. However, because the items were intended for retailers and restaurants, there were quite a few places where the items needed to be recalled from. Add in the fact that the items were frozen, and therefore may have been stashed away in freezers, and it was a complicated recall to action.
Call us old-fashioned, but we tend to expect what's on the label of a product to be what's inside the item itself. However, it's amazing how often food companies manage to mislabel and misbrand their food, resulting in huge risks for the folks eating it and huge problems for the companies themselves. One instance of this occurred in 2016, when the Home Maid Ravioli Company had to recall approximately 38,950 pounds of ravioli and pasta products, because multiple products weren't declared on the label. It turned out that some of its products contained both whey and pork, with both ingredients being unsuitable for consumption for some folks with allergies or dietary restrictions -- but these ingredients were nowhere to be seen on the product itself.
This recall affected 20 different products made and distributed under the Home Made brand name. Although they were only shipped to locations in California, the sheer quantity of the items made this recall a pretty notable one. Incredibly, the issue was discovered almost by accident, when the Food Inspection and Safety Service was investigating products made in a different plant.
You may love it, you may hate it, but you can't deny it: Stouffer's lasagna is everywhere. With its massive ubiquity and availability in virtually every supermarket in the land, you can quite reasonably expect its production to have reached a high standard, with not a lot of margin for error. That all went out of the window in 2016, when Stouffer's chicken lasagna, made in Nestlé USA's Springville, Utah plant, had to be recalled due to foreign objects potentially being in the items. The foreign objects themselves? Shards of glass.
Now, we don't know about you, but we're not crazy about glass being in our lasagna, folks. Nestlé was alerted to the issue when multiple customers complained of finding glass in their products, which led to a hasty recall of the lasagna from locations all over the country. Somewhat incredibly, Nestlé also had to recall a chicken pizza produced in a different plant for the same reason, which seems to imply that the glass had made it into the food via the chicken. In total, over 267,000 pounds of product had to be recalled.
It seems like Nestlé has a bit of a problem with items ending up in its food. Its 2016 recall of chicken lasagna products which contained glass wasn't the first time that the company had to tackle a recall concerning foreign objects, and a couple years before it had the same issue with its Lean Cuisine pasta frozen dinners. Back in 2011, Nestlé had to recall a large number of its spaghetti and meatball Lean Cuisine products, because customers were finding pieces of hard plastic in them. Well over 10,000 pounds of the products had to be recalled from locations east of the Rocky Mountains.
The job was made slightly easier for Nestlé, as the offending products were all packaged on the same day, resulting in them being easier to track down. However, the fact that they were quicker to find didn't make the recall any less serious. Plastic in food can present a grave choking hazard, and may cause cuts to the mouth and throat if swallowed. The good news was that nobody had reported any injuries from eating the meals.
Alfredo sauce doesn't always contain egg, but the ingredient can end up in some recipes as a way to add creaminess and body. If egg is present in Alfredo sauce, though, people with egg allergies really need to know about it, to avoid the risk of any adverse symptoms or illnesses as a result of consuming it. Clearly, that was a bit too tricky for Whitsons Food Service Corp., a New York-based food company, who in 2023 had to recall well over 8,700 pounds of its chicken Alfredo with broccoli and penne pasta meals. The issue? You guessed it -- the Alfredo pasta had egg in it.
Apparently, Whitsons Food Service Corp. had recently updated its sauce recipe to one that contained egg, but it hadn't passed that info on to the part of its company that made the labels for its items. Because of this, the labels for the pasta product remained the same, and there was no sign of egg anywhere. This was pretty serious, as these products were shipped to various institutions, including schools. Given that egg allergies are particularly common in children, this could have resulted in a nasty outcome.
Nestlé is the largest food company in the world, so it's probably no surprise that it's had a fair few recalls in its time. Several of these recalls have involved its pasta products, with one in 2020 involving nearly 30,000 pounds of product. Nestlé's Lean Cuisine Fettuccine Alfredo had to be recalled after it turned out that it had chicken in it. The problem was that the product wasn't labeled as containing chicken, no doubt creating a pretty nasty surprise for the folks who bought and ate it.
The fact that this dish turned out not to be suitable for vegetarians was not the only problem. The Lean Cuisine product also had soy in it, which is an allergen that can cause some fairly unpleasant (and sometimes gravely serious) symptoms. To add to the massive amount of products that Nestlé had to recall, it also had to deal with the fact that its Lean Cuisine meals had been shipped to stores around the country. Amazon Fresh, Food Lion, H-E-B, Kroger, and Walmart were just a few of the retailers that stocked the items.
Like any other allergen, soy can cause some pretty horrendous symptoms. In the most serious cases, a response to a soy allergy can result in anaphylaxis, marked by difficulty breathing and a dangerous drop in blood pressure. It's therefore highly important that food companies label their products clearly when they contain soy, and although it can be common in processed food, people rightly don't assume that it'll be in their meals unless it says so.
That's what made a 2021 recall of pasta products so serious. Bellisio Foods was forced to recall almost 4,000 pounds of its spaghetti with meat sauce meals after soy ended up in the product, but not on the label. To be fair to Bellisio Foods, it wasn't like it was knowingly putting soy in its food: The issue was that soy-containing ingredients had allegedly commingled with the regular ingredients in the spaghetti. Regardless, it was necessary to find all of the products it had sent out to market, which had been shipped around the country.
Frozen ravioli. It's a winner, right? Easy to prepare, and even easier to eat. However, given that processed ravioli can sometimes be filled with a fairly vague combination of ingredients (which is usually delicious, regardless of what it actually is), we want to make sure that it's safe to eat.
Well, in 2011, that may have been more challenging if you were buying ravioli made by D'Orazio Foods. Five of its ravioli products had to be recalled after it was discovered that they had been made at a time when Food Safety and Inspection Service staff weren't on site, and therefore were sent out without being inspected properly. Although there were no illnesses reported as a result of the products being sold or eaten, this was clearly still a big issue, as a myriad of problems could have gone wrong. Things were made even more complicated by the fact that the products were sent to seven different states, which were spread across the whole country. Oh, and the recall involved approximately 161,000 pounds of product. These things are never easy, huh? You may be able to transform frozen ravioli into a pasta bake, but you probably won't want to in cases like this.
Frozen lasagna is generally pretty predictable, right? The layers of cheese, white sauce, and the slightly floppy pasta -- you know what you're getting, and it's easy to upgrade. So it was a shock for customers in 2012 when they bought their Stouffer's frozen lasagnas, and opened them up to find ... Stuffed peppers instead. It seems that there was a bit of a mix-up at the plant that the Stouffer's lasagnas were being packed in, and somebody had switched the pasta for the peppers meal, but nobody thought to change the labels too. Nestlé only found out when two customers complained about receiving the wrong meal, and honestly, we can't blame them.
Unfortunately, Nestlé had to deal with a pretty hefty recall as a result. The company had shipped almost 17,000 pounds of mispackaged products to locations east of the Mississippi River, and it had to scramble to try and get them back. Plus, it wasn't just the fact that the product was mispackaged which was the problem. It was also that the stuffed peppers that were in the packaging contained Worcestershire sauce, a non-vegan condiment made with anchovies, which could have triggered an allergic response in some folks.
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