This story is the second in a three-part series exploring Trader Joe’s business practices. Click here to read the first story on Trader Joe’s brand identity and environmental violations. Check back tomorrow for the final installment, an investigation into patterns of harassment and growing frustration among store employees.

Onions possibly carrying disease-causing bacteria. Deadly organic carrots. Bad frozen waffles. Dangerous deli meat and poultry products. From late October to mid-November, most major American grocery chains were forced to recall many of these items, generating a new wave of concern about how to keep the food system safe. Yet this period was hardly the first round of news-making scares for one of the most popular names in the grocery business: Trader Joe’s.

The chain had to recall the same onions, carrots, waffles, and other products as every other store. But that recent spate followed 22 additional Trader Joe’s recalls since the spring of 2023. Half of those were tied to the kinds of common foodborne pathogens—listeria, salmonella, E. coli, hepatitis A—that frequently cause food recalls.

The rest were more unusual and read like something out of a grim reality show where contestants are forced to escape a booby-trapped specialty grocer: metal in multigrain crackers, glass shards in instant cold brew, scented candles that burst into flames (causing property damage and at least two burn incidents), rocks in windmill cookies and frozen falafel and the frozen chicken pilaf, insects in 2.4 million pounds of unfortunately named Unexpected Broccoli Cheddar Soup, and 30 tons of steamed chicken soup dumplings that the USDA warned could contain permanent-marker fragments.

All of these products were sold under Trader Joe’s own private label, raising serious questions about whether the brand’s famously frugal approach (to limit costs and save the end shopper money) and supply chain opacity is affecting consumer wellness.

As the number of recalls has continued growing over the past year and a half, Trader Joe’s has said nothing, outside of dismissing them early on as “a coincidence.” The company declined to answer Fast Company’s questions about its recalls. But workers told us they’ve borne the fallout as the number of recalls has unsettled some regular customers. Store staff, as the front line of customer engagement, is left to repeat corporate claims that Trader Joe’s food-safety practices exceed industry requirements. But staff can’t go into further details as it’s Trader Joe’s policy—unique in its competitive set—to not publicly disclose where its food products come from or provide detailed explanations about the quality-control measures it uses to ensure consumer safety.

Food-safety lawyer Bill Marler—a central character in the documentary Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food and perhaps the most prominent food-safety advocate in America—says the rash of recalls by Trader Joe’s is unprecedented. In 30 years, he hasn’t seen so many recalls for “odd things” (like rocks) compressed into such a short period of time, he told Fast Company, adding “the wheels of the bus came off” in a way that’s left Trader Joe’s channeling serious Chipotle circa 2015 energy. “If you buy from suppliers at low prices, but you don’t ask how they could get the price so low and something goes sideways,” he noted, “that’s on you.”

If you compare the grocery chain Aldi, owned by the same German family (the Albrechts) that owns Trader Joe’s, it has listed 27 product recalls since 2021. Only one, for turkey kielbasa this past March, was recalled for having a foreign material, and only one involved an Aldi private-label product—macaroni salad in May, for wheat that it failed to mention in the list of ingredients. The rest originated with outside brands and were blamed on either a common industry contaminant or a routine manufacturing defect, such as walnuts in nut-free muffins or Kraft Singles with defective packaging.

Trader Joe’s claims “nothing is more important” than food safety and says it goes “well beyond regulatory requirements” to communicate potential problems. It also contends that customers are uniquely incentivized to report foreign materials, because of the brand’s famous no-questions-asked returns policy: Bring back any item you don’t like, for any reason, and get a full refund.

But the mishaps are still striking given how few items Trader Joe’s stocks in the first place: around 4,000 compared to 40,000 to 50,000 for Kroger, or 200,000 for a Walmart Supercenter. (To put that in context: Trader Joe’s has been tied to 16 FDA- and USDA-related recalls since 2023, while Walmart is linked to 32 and Kroger to 15.)

Stocking fewer items is part of what Trader Joe’s calls “intensive buying”—a process of........

© Fast Company