Is That Recall Real? How to Check Before You Throw Food Out

Some of the recall posts going around right now are years old. Two of the bagged salad recalls being shared this month are real recalls from December 2021 and April 2023, and both are closed. The people sharing them are not lying. The dates just fell off on the way.

This is the check that settles it, and it takes about two minutes.

The two minute check

Go to the agency, not to the post. For an ordinary packaged food, that is the FDA's recalls page, which is searchable, filterable and ordered newest first. Every entry shows the date, the brand, the product description, the reason, the company, and whether the recall has been terminated.

If it is meat, poultry or a processed egg product, you are at the wrong agency. Those are USDA, and they have their own recalls page. The package tells you which: a USDA inspected product carries the inspection mark and an establishment number, something like EST. or P- followed by digits, which may be inside the mark, elsewhere on the pack, or on a tray closure. A bag of salad is usually an FDA check. A salad with inspected chicken in it may be USDA. When you cannot tell, search both.

Then match the package, not the name. This is the step people skip. Recall notices identify a specific production run, and "I have the same brand" is not enough.

Photograph the package before you do anything with it. If the notice turns out to apply, you will need those codes, and if you have already binned the packaging you cannot check.

What that list does not include, which matters

The FDA's recalls page is a public warning list, not a complete database. FDA says so plainly: it gathers certain information from press releases and other public notices, and "not all recalls have press releases or are posted on this page." The fuller picture, after recalls have been classified, is the weekly Enforcement Report.

It only holds three years. Older entries are archived. So a search that comes back empty does not prove a claim is invented; it may just be old. If you are checking something from a few years back, search the FDA archive with the product or company name and the year.

"Terminated" does not mean the warning was fake. It means FDA decided all reasonable efforts were made to remove or correct the product and it was properly disposed of. It is the closure of the recall action. An entry with nothing in that field is ongoing or completed, which is not the same as unresolved.

Why old recall news keeps coming back

Here are the two being circulated this month, with their real dates off the agency record.

Both are genuine. Neither is happening now. And neither belongs on today's FDA list, because that list only carries three years.

A recent looking date on a search result is not the date of the event. Google explains that its systems estimate when a page was published or meaningfully updated, using several signals including dates shown on the page and the publisher's own metadata. A real old recall can be linked in a new post, republished, or updated, and end up wearing a fresh looking label. Treat the post time and the search result date as the date that item was circulating. Read the event date off the agency record.

We should be careful about how far to push that. Nobody has published a study measuring how often food recalls specifically get recycled on social platforms, or why particular ones resurface. The research that exists on recall communication is about trust and how people respond, not about stale posts. So the mechanism above is documented; the frequency is not.

And if you already threw out lettuce because of one of these, you did a sensible thing with bad information. The fix is not to stop believing recalls. It is to check the package and the date first.

What a recall notice actually means

Four words get used as though they mean the same thing.

• Recall. A firm removes or corrects a product that violates the law. It can start with the company, with an FDA request, or with an FDA order. For food, FDA says these are usually started voluntarily by the manufacturer or distributor.
• Market withdrawal. A minor issue that would not be subject to legal action. FDA's own example is a tampering case with no manufacturing problem. Not a recall.
• Public health alert. A USDA warning issued when there is a health concern but a recall is not requested, often because the product is no longer on sale. It is a warning, not evidence that something is still in shops.
• Safety alert. In FDA's formal definitions this is a medical device term. The website heading uses it more loosely, so do not read every notice as a recall.

The class number describes the hazard, not how many people got sick. Class I means a reasonable probability of serious harm or death. Class II means temporary or reversible effects are possible, or serious ones are remote. Class III means harm is unlikely.

⚠️ Class II does not mean safe to eat. If your package matches, follow the notice. The classification is FDA's assessment of the risk, not permission to ignore it.

A recall is also not an illness count. The two are separate things and either can happen without the other. In December 2022 Wegmans recalled organic microgreens, a kale and spinach product, and cat grass across seven states after supplied soil tested positive for Salmonella. No illnesses were associated with it. That is a real recall of a real product with a real hazard and a zero in the illness column, and it is the clearest example of why one number does not imply the other.

If it does match

Read the notice first, because it may give specific instructions.

Usually you return it for a refund. If you cannot, FDA says dispose of it properly: wrapped or contained securely so that people and animals cannot get at it. Do not give it to a food bank, to another person, or to a pet. And do not bin a product that does not match just because the name looks similar.

For a Listeria recall there is a cleaning step people miss. FDA's guidance is to wash the refrigerator's interior walls and shelves, plus any cutting boards, counters and utensils the food may have touched, then sanitize with 1 tablespoon of chlorine bleach to 1 gallon of hot water, dry with a clean unused cloth or paper towel, and wash your hands afterward.

The microgreens part, and a correction to our own page

We had this number wrong, so here it is corrected. This site has published that five microgreen recalls are on record. Two separate audits of the FDA and CFIA records, ours and a fresh one run on 2026-08-14, disagree with that number and with each other. Combining them gives at least eight documented events, and neither audit claims to be exhaustive.

Why two careful audits produced different lists is the actual lesson of this page. The second audit found three events the first had missed. The first held one the second did not. Neither was sloppy. There is no single query that spans both agencies, the two use different words for the same kind of event, and FDA states outright that its public warning page is not complete. If counting recalls is this awkward for people doing it deliberately, a number in a social post deserves the check described above.

Two things have changed since we last counted. There are now two Class 1 events, both from May 2026, which is the serious end of the scale rather than the notification end the earlier ones sat at. And the illness column still reads the same way down every row: not one of these events reported an associated illness. That is not the same as no risk, and both halves are true at once.

⚠️ A second correction, and this one retracts a retraction. This site previously said that one of these recalls traced to Salmonella in the growing soil, then withdrew that as more than the record supported. The withdrawal was the mistake. The FDA notice for the Wegmans recall, read on 2026-08-14, says plainly that some of the soil the crop was grown in, supplied by a named company, tested positive for Salmonella by the supplier. So the growing medium is not a theoretical route on this record. It is a documented one, in the only US recall on the list.

A home grower has no recall system. There is no mechanism that tells you your seed lot was implicated. You would find out through the seller, an agency notice, an email list you happened to join, or not at all. Without the packet and the lot number you often cannot tell whether a notice applies to you.

FDA's traceability guidance for commercial sprout operations is not a home rule, and microgreens are legally distinct from sprouts, but the mechanism is worth stealing: keep the supplier, the variety, the receipt date, the lot numbers, and the dates you used the lot. Extension guidance for microgreen growers says the same thing in plainer terms, seed to harvest, so you can work backward if something goes wrong.

The household version takes ten seconds. Keep the seed packet, or photograph it. Note the variety, the lot or batch number, where you bought it, and which tray you sowed it in. Label the tray. That is it.

If a seed lot you have used is recalled, the conservative action, adapted from FDA's sprout rules, is: do not eat or give away the crop, stop using the remaining seed, keep the packet and supplier details, follow whatever the notice says, and clean and sanitize the tray before you use it again.

⚠️ One thing nobody has published, and we are not going to invent it: there is no government instruction that specifically says to discard a home microgreen tray after a seed lot recall. What there is, for sprouts, is an instruction to stop using seed from the affected lot and keep the crop out of commerce. What there is not is any evidence that harvesting, washing or trimming makes a recalled lot safe.

Sources

• FDA, Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts, read 2026-08-14: the live table, its columns, its filters, and the three year retention.
• FDA, additional information about recalls: the statement that not all recalls are posted, and the pointer to the Enforcement Report.
• FDA, Enforcement Reports: the weekly post-classification list.
• FDA, recalls background and definitions: recall, market withdrawal, safety alert, and the Class I, II and III definitions.
• USDA FSIS, recalls and public health alerts: the meat, poultry and processed egg route, and the public health alert definition.
• FDA, food recalls: what you need to know: matching package identifiers, safe disposal, and the 1 tablespoon bleach to 1 gallon hot water sanitizing ratio.
• FDA, FDA.gov archive: where notices older than three years go.
• Google, helping Search know the best date for a page: how a result's displayed date is estimated, and why it is not the event date.
• FDA, Revolution Farms expanded recall: the April 2023 dates, the six states, and the terminated status.
• FDA, Fresh Express packaged salad outbreak investigation: the 2021-12-20 recall, product codes Z324 to Z350, and the final count of 10 illnesses, 10 hospitalizations and 1 death as of 2022-03-08.
• FDA, Wegmans microgreens recall: the seven state December 2022 recall with no associated illnesses.
• FDA, Greenbelt Microgreens recall: the Listeria recall dates.
• CFIA, Arcadia Microgreens, CFIA, Kyan Culture and Farm Boy, CFIA, Micro Verdure: the Canadian microgreen records, including the two Class 1 E. coli recalls of May 2026.
• FDA, sprout guidance, September 2023: the commercial seed lot traceability model and the corrective action language for an implicated lot.
• University of Nevada Reno Extension, microgreens and produce safety and Penn State Extension, the ABCs of microgreens: seed to harvest traceability, and seed lot numbers from better suppliers.
• Peer reviewed study of food recall communication: trust, risk perception and protective intention. It does not measure recycled recall posts, which is why this page does not claim a frequency.