The Gut Health Recall Tracker
What this is. A standing count of US food recalls caused by pathogens that make people sick to the stomach, pulled from both federal agencies that issue them, normalised so the years can be compared. We publish the underlying data, the method and the mistakes it is easy to make with it. Updated quarterly.
Data pulled September 22, 2026. FDA records run to September 16, 2026; USDA records to July 23, 2026. Covers 2019 onward.
The number4,231 recalls, 1,033 of them gut pathogens
Between January 2019 and the pull date, the two federal agencies that recall food issued 4,231 distinct recalls. Of those, 1,033 named a pathogen with gastrointestinal presentation: Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, Cyclospora, Hepatitis A, norovirus, Clostridium and their relatives.
The first thing to know about this data is the thing most counts get wrong. The FDA publishes one record per recalled product line, so a single recall can appear dozens of times in the raw file. Those 1,033 recalls are carried by 5,237 records — about five records each. One event alone, a Listeria recall by Fresh Ideation Food Group reported on March 22, 2023, accounts for 409 records, or 7.8 percent of every gut-pathogen record in the series. Count records instead of recalls and that one day looks like a crisis.
By yearRecalls per year, and what moved
| Year | Gut-pathogen recalls | All recalls | Pathogen share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 169 | 633 | 26.7% |
| 2020 | 107 | 470 | 22.8% |
| 2021 | 115 | 511 | 22.5% |
| 2022 | 121 | — | — |
| 2023 | 102 | — | — |
| 2024 | 141 | — | — |
| 2025 | 182 | — | — |
| 2026 (partial) | 96 | — | — |
2025 was the series high at 182. And Salmonella has already passed every complete year in the series: 55 recalls by September 16, 2026, against 46, 42, 51, 47, 31 and 42 in the six years from 2019 to 2024.
By pathogenListeria leads, Cyclospora came back
| Pathogen | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026* | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Listeria | 72 | 47 | 49 | 54 | 42 | 76 | 74 | 18 | 432 |
| Salmonella | 46 | 42 | 51 | 47 | 31 | 42 | 77 | 55 | 391 |
| E. coli (STEC) | 24 | 11 | 6 | 11 | 12 | 12 | 10 | 7 | 93 |
| Clostridium | 7 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 13 | 10 | 38 |
| Cyclospora | 6 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 16 |
| Norovirus | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 15 |
| Hepatitis A | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 13 |
Listeria is the largest single bucket at 432 recalls, 42 percent of the total. The most striking line is Cyclospora, the parasite behind several produce outbreaks: six recalls in 2019, four in 2020, three in 2021, then zero in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 — and three in 2026, including the Taylor Farms de México and CIBUS Fresh recalls reported on August 19. We covered that outbreak as it happened; the four-year gap before it is the context no single story carried.
Reach and timingHow far a recall travels, and when
The median gut-pathogen recall reaches four states; the mean is 7.75, and the gap between the two is the handful of very wide recalls pulling the average up. Of the 753 recalls where distribution could be resolved with confidence, 132 were nationwide, 585 multistate and 186 single-state.
Seasonality does not follow the summer-picnic story. Counting by the month a recall was initiated across the complete years 2019 to 2025, the peaks are May (115), October (114) and November (114). The quietest month is January (39).
Read it rightFour ways this data misleads
1. Allergens are not gut pathogens. Undeclared allergens caused 1,641 recalls over the same period — 1.6 times the pathogen count. They are a different safety problem, and they are excluded from every figure above. A headline about “food recalls rising” is usually counting them together.
2. A recall count is not an illness count. It counts regulatory actions. Better detection — whole-genome sequencing, environmental monitoring, company self-testing — raises recall counts without any change in how much contaminated food exists. There is no denominator here: no production volume, no testing rate.
3. The last quarter is always undercounted. The FDA’s date is the enforcement-report publication date, which lags the recall itself by weeks. The twin egg recalls of 2026 were initiated on July 22 and published on August 19.
4. The two agencies are not on the same footing. FDA recalls rose from 502 in 2019 to 575 in 2025. USDA’s meat and poultry notices fell from 131 in 2019 to 50 in 2020 and never returned to that level. That is a change in the reporting record, not a finding about meat safety, and we would not report it as one.
The dataDownload, method, and how to cite it
The full dataset is free to download and reuse, including commercially, with attribution.
- Download the full tracker (CSV, 5.8 MB, 12,670 records across 4,231 recalls)
- Method and limitations (Markdown)
Sources. openFDA food enforcement API and the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service recall API. Both are public and free. Our pull, normalisation rules and pathogen-classification logic are documented in full in the method file, including the 7 percent of records whose reason text did not classify to any pathogen — those are kept in the data and counted in the totals rather than quietly dropped.
One limitation to state plainly. The USDA half of this pull is two months behind the FDA half, because the agency’s API refused our requests and we fell back to an archived copy of the same official endpoint dated July 24, 2026. Do not compute an FDA-versus-USDA ratio for 2026 from this release. The gap closes on the next quarterly rebuild.
Cite this as: Gut Health Times, “The Gut Health Recall Tracker,” data pulled September 22, 2026. https://guthealthtimes.org/gut-health-recall-tracker/
If you are a reporter or researcher and need a cut of this data we have not published — a single pathogen, a single state, a longer window — email editor@guthealthtimes.org and we will run it.
This page is educational and is not medical or food-safety advice. For recall notices affecting food in your home, check FDA and FSIS directly.