After the “Summer of Recalls,” many consumers are understandably nervous about food safety, wondering if the industry is doing enough to protect them. Headlines claiming that recalls are up 400 percent this year fueled consumer fear, and the public is now looking for reassurance about the safety of our food supply.
It’s a given that public health must be the highest priority for the food industry. It’s also important to understand the reality we live in today, where the viral nature of information causes claims to spread quickly and widely, without much regard to their accuracy or context. The 400 percent statistic wasn’t necessarily incorrect, but understanding the specific numbers it was representing will help offset consumer fear — without detracting from the responsibility the food industry has to keep consumers safe.
So let me clarify what the number is measuring, what that means for how you shop, and what you can expect from the industry so you can respond to a recall correctly.
Frequency vs. Scale
First, the 400 percent figure spread through social media, not a published report. A social media creator claimed she had read “something” that said recalls were up 400 percent, but didn’t point to where the number had come from or what it was specifically representing. The 400 percent story moved fast because it confirmed what people already felt about recalls happening more frequently.
The underlying data tells a different story. The number of recalls hasn’t changed much: regulators recorded 1,634 recalls in the first half of 2026, compared to 1,636 during the same period last year. However, recalls are getting bigger and more complex. Recalled units went from 211.2 million to 941.2 million year over year, which is where the 400 percent comes from.
Complex, global supply chains can cause a single issue to impact dozens of brands at once because they share a supplier. Case in point: lettuce contaminated with Cyclospora came from an international supplier with wide distribution. This supplier distributed tainted lettuce that ended up in numerous Taco Bell restaurant locations, plus multiple grocery store brands nationwide. When a small number of large suppliers serve many brands, one contamination event can have a much wider footprint than it did a decade ago.
Frequency and scale are two different problems with two different solutions. If recalls were happening more frequently, we’d need to be looking at prevention protocols and food safety culture. Larger scale recalls suggest that we need to be looking at traceability systems and consumer communication practices, so we can quickly identify affected product and get that information into the hands of people at risk. Both are areas that the industry is making progress in, and both still have a lot of work that needs to be done.
What does this mean for consumers?
A large recall doesn’t automatically mean the food supply is unsafe. It may simply be that one ingredient traveled more widely than it used to, the way Cyclospora-contaminated lettuce did this summer. Consumers don’t have to stop buying lettuce, they just have to stop buying lettuce from the affected source. That’s only possible if the industry can trace the product and give consumers accurate information, quickly and specifically enough to act on.
Recalling companies should be able to communicate quickly and clearly about which products were affected. Do they provide clear product identifiers so consumers can easily tell if the items they bought or consumed were part of the recall? Are messages simple to understand and act on? Is the company working collaboratively with their supply chain partners without pointing blame or becoming defensive? Are consumers hearing accurate, consistent information from both the supplier and the point where the product was sold?
Consumers are right to expect this level of communication. When the information doesn’t come, people are left guessing about their own groceries, and that’s not a position anyone should be in.
I can’t tell you that recalls are rare or that nothing has changed. Unfortunately, recalls are getting bigger and that’s a real problem the industry has to solve. But often, a recall means that the system caught a potentially harmful issue and is doing something about it. The companies that communicate well in the midst of the recall have the best chance of avoiding additional harm through the viral spread of inaccurate or incomplete information. People went looking for information about their food this summer and found a number on social media instead. The industry can do better than that, and should.
About the author: Roger Hancock, CEO of Recall InfoLink, is an expert on recalls, with experience that spans the retail, tech, data, regulatory, and supply chain. Roger is also a steering committee member of the Alliance for Recall Ready Communities.
