Almost half a year (that’s right, half a year!) after Fresh Realm ready-to-reheat meals were originally linked to a Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) outbreak and the original recalls were conducted – illnesses continue and pasta as an ingredient by another supplier (Nate’s Fine Foods) is now contributing to a wave of ingredient driven recalls in a variety of pasta containing meal products sold by retailers.
While this one seems ripe for more transparent investigatory reporting, either by public health officials or the media, so we can all learn from it and prevent something like this from happening again, here are some Straight Talk aspects not making news.
There continue to be additional illnesses & deaths per CDC’s epi curve well past the orginal June 2025 investigation and recall.
That means that additional illnesses, deaths, & recalls could have been prevented, if a proper root cause investigation would have been conducted back in June.
Remember, simply recalling a food item during an outbreak is NOT good enough. We need to insist on better root cause investigations by both the public & private sector to accurate identify what went wrong & prevent a reoccurrence.
This outbreak investigation may have been complicated because it involved two federal agencies, the FDA and USDA.
As previously reported, the last FDA inspection on record for the pasta supplier was in May of 2025, a month before the original outbreak was reported, and it resulted in NAI, which means “no actions indicated” because no objectionable conditions or practices were found. Report can be found here.
HOW did the issue of repeatedly contaminating cooked pasta with Lm get missed in that inspection by regulators – as well as by the company? The consequences of that miss are proving to be costly.
And where’s the outrage? Outrage related to foodborne outbreaks appears to be selective, expressed in some but not in others.
Due to the original misses, multiple federal regulatory agency involvement, and the ongoing nature of preventable illnesses, this one seems ripe for oversight, whether by the agencies themselves, the GAO, or Congress, so we can all learn from it and get better.
As yet another interesting aspect, most retailers require GFSI based audits annually of their suppliers. While I haven’t seen any of the third-party audit reports, I suspect they too – like federal investigators – failed to identify the risk and less than adequate preventive controls by the company during their audits.
But lastly, let me be clear, producing safe food is first and foremost a producer’s responsibility. It’s clear the food producer, in this case Nate’s Fine Foods, either failed to identify Listeria as a foreseeable risk, over indexed on the assumption this product would be reheated thoroughly by consumers before consumption, and/or failed to implement adequate controls. It could be a combination of these factors, and more.
Bottom line. We CAN do better.
It’s critical that we learn from such tragic incidents to ensure they never happen again.
Consumers deserve that from us.
