The recall of Grimmway Farms organic carrots, sold as a store brand at Whole Foods, Target and more, exposes a centralized food system prone to disease outbreaks.
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It practically didn’t matter where you shopped: If you bought organic carrots in late summer and early fall this year, you had to throw them away unless you were willing to risk becoming contaminated with E. coli.
That’s what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended in a Recall announcement on November 16 from Grimmway Farms organic carrots. So far, 39 people in 18 states have become ill.
The point is, you may not have known you were buying carrots from Grimmway Farms, but if you were buying the store brands Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, Target and others, you were. All of these stores package Grimmway carrots as their own and were therefore subject to the recall.
Indeed, the recall makes clear something that may have been known only to very savvy consumers: Much of the meat and produce that ends up on supermarket shelves under different store or “private” brand labels comes from the same, centralized producers. This means that if there is contamination of any of these foods, shoppers at many different stores across the country will be affected, making the already lengthy task for health authorities to track down the perpetrator of the contamination more difficult. .
“We see this in a lot of recalls, right?” says Donald Schaffner, chair of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “Wherever you go and you say it’s this store brand, but there are all these other names or store brands because this company produced things under a variety of different labels and packaging types and things like that.”
An illusion of choice when it comes to products from the supermarket
Store brand meats and products (and really any store brand products) are attractive to shoppers because they are typically cheaper than brand name products. Sometimes they are even the brand name option; For example, Grimmway organic carrots are sold in many stores as private label products, but they are also sold as Cal-Organic and Bunny Luv brand carrots. You may see them side by side in different price ranges.
But determining how centralized other products are is a bit tricky. The Cornucopia Institute, a nonprofit watchdog of the organic food industry, notes that a national retailer can source from several regional farms throughout the year, meaning that “a single store brand can come from multiple sources over time. ”
Schaffner notes that this lack of transparency extends to the items in your local grocery store.
“I would say this applies not only to agricultural products, but also to a large part of our food supply,” he says. “Anything that is a store brand, the store does not produce. They go to co-packers or co-manufacturers. And that sometimes also applies to their delicacies. If they have a hot bar and things like that, they don’t make it all in the back of the house, so there have to be companies that do that.”
Because retailers don’t have to specify which specific farm their products come from, recalls offer an idea of the extent to which the stores source their food.
In 2023, Sunrise Growers Inc. An recall of frozen fruit products which were in store brand products at Whole Foods, Target, Aldi, Walmart and Trader Joe’s. In 2022, Old Europe Cheese Inc. An memory of the brie and camembert it sells under several brand names — Primo Taglio, La Bonne Vie, Jeanne d’Arc — and store brands, namely Target and Trader Joe’s. And in 2023, HMC Farms recalled peaches, plums and nectarines sold at Walmart and Sprouts in seven states.
Over the past three years, the FDA has recorded 28 recalls of foods sold under multiple store and brand names. It’s possible, Schaffner says, that advances in food testing systems will allow us to identify the sources of foodborne illness more often than before.
“To some extent we have an increasingly centralized food system and so if there is a problem in that system, it is magnified,” Schaffner says. “When outbreaks occur, they tend to be large and CDC is now doing a good job of putting these pieces together. With advances in this whole-genome sequencing approach, we may see outbreaks that we may have missed before.”
Food recalls highlight the challenges and successes of the national food testing program
Make no mistake: It’s a good thing that state and federal health authorities noticed the E. coli outbreak in Grimmway Farms’ organic carrots. However, the recall notice was only issued weeks after the carrots in question were already off the shelves – either because retailers were pulling them off the shelves or because people bought them and currently have them in the refrigerator.
That delay is inherent to the system, says Dr. Edward Lifshitz, medical director of the NJ Department of Health’s (NJDOH) Infectious and Zoonotic Disease Program. Consider how an outbreak of E. coli, listeria, salmonella or any other foodborne illness could be contracted.
A person must consume the infected product. It must make them sick, which is not always the case. They have to be sick enough to go to a doctor (again, not always the case), and the doctor has to suspect something like food poisoning in order to then order a stool sample. If the sample comes back positive, it is then sent to the CDC, which will sequence the DNA and compare it to other samples brought in from around the country to determine if there are any matches.
Then health departments should start interviewing the sick people — as the NJDOH did for the two people in New Jersey who got sick from carrots — to determine what they ate a few days before they got sick. That’s not easy; Can you remember everything you ate three weeks ago?
Ultimately, and hopefully, enough people who tested positive for the same disease say they ate the same thing and that the disease can be traced back to its origins. But during the weeks-long process, there are obstacles at every step.
“If you go to the doctor very often, that doctor will say, ‘It’s probably one of these things, let me give you an antibiotic,’ and there’s no testing,” says Lifshitz. “Public health would not be able to get any information from that. We would only get information if that doctor is suspicious enough (to) do a stool culture. … Once we get that positive result, we go to the local health department, interview that person and say, ‘Okay, we know you have a positive stool culture for E. coli, let’s find out where you could have gotten that from. of, ‘but we are now two weeks after that person ate that.’
Although many people eat foods included in a recall, not everyone gets sick. It is people with pre-existing health problems and/or a weakened immune system who become the victims of such situations. Time is of the essence in these cases, Lifshitz says.
“Is it actually discouraging that it takes weeks for us to have an idea that it’s real enough to give people an idea of what could be causing a problem? Yes, absolutely,” he says. “Especially for an article like this where the contaminated carrots – assuming they were carrots – have already been removed from the shelves. It may still be in some people’s homes. We would like to look at this much earlier. Really, despite all the things that have to happen before you get to a point where you get an idea of what the cause might be, it’s really hard to do that faster.
Schaffner adds that when there is an outbreak, it is typically the result of a “perfect storm” of causes in the harvesting, production and processing pipeline. The FDA is charged with inspecting manufacturing operations, but they are only required to conduct an inspection once a year – although sometimes third-party inspectors, such as those from the national retailers that purchase these foods, may do further inspections.
That is to say, the work done to identify the culprits of foodborne illness is critical to ensuring public health.
“In a sense I don’t want to be an apologist, but it shows that the system is working because we are finding these outbreaks, but certainly the fact that there are Are outbreaks are concerning,” he says.
Looking ahead to possible regulatory changes
At the very least, you could say that changes are afoot in the agricultural sector. The incoming Trump administration and the nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have hinted at changes to everything from industrial farm subsidies to regulatory cuts.
Perhaps this means that national retailers will try to source their products locally – and to be clear, many do so when it is seasonally appropriate and economically viable. And rules requiring retailers to print exactly where their food was grown would be welcome by many in the food and healthcare industries.
But the basic hope is that the safeguards the CDC and FDA have put in place will continue to receive budgetary support, Lifshitz and Schaffner say.
“It’s clear that food safety is important,” says Schaffner. “What CDC does is important, what FDA does is important. Most of that work is done not by political appointees, but by bureaucrats or scientists, who have their feet on the ground. (…) It is clear that if people are concerned about this, they should speak out. It’s definitely everyone in my community; we are also talking about this because we see what is coming.”
“It is the FDA that has the authority and ability to conduct inspections and other matters related to food,” Lifshitz added. “So we are certainly very dependent on our federal partners, and we would be concerned if something were to happen that would limit their ability to function.
Matt Cortina is a food reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at [email protected].
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