In the pet food, supplements and treats space, recalls tied to undeclared allergens, foreign material and Salmonella contamination have made headlines throughout 2026. It’s a longstanding pattern that companies can get ahead of with better internal review, supplier monitoring and crisis planning.
Roger Hancock of Recall InfoLink said the numbers back up what he's seen for years. Over the past two decades, more than 3,900 pet food and animal feed recalls have occurred, averaging around 15 a month, he said.
"What varies from event to event is whether or not the media picks up the story," Hancock said.
David Lennarz, president of Registrar Corp, agreed the current volume of recalls is consistent with what his company has observed, noting the same issues — undeclared allergens, foreign material and pathogen contamination — appear "pretty consistent across not only pet food, but human foods as well."
What manufacturers say in hindsight
Each source pointed to a different lesson companies tend to learn only after a recall has already happened.
Lennarz said it's rare for a manufacturer to admit it knowingly ignored a risk. “More often, companies say what they believed were minor issues had compounded due to volume of production and thus became a much bigger problem,” he said.
Rick Kingston, co-founder and president of regulatory and scientific affairs at SafetyCall International, said manufacturers frequently tell him they should have acted sooner.
"We wish we would have jumped on this right when it happened, rather than waiting to see whether an issue got worse or letting product sell through despite a suspected adulterant.
“That can be a business-threatening event," he said. “The root cause is usually a mismanaged adverse event rather than a marketing or sales failure.”
Hancock said the most common admission he hears involves the difficulty of pulling together data quickly enough to communicate with customers during an actual event. That gap, he said, usually traces back to a mock recall that "tested traceback and stopped there," rather than the full process — including how decisions were made, whether data was accurate and accessible, and how trading partners responded.
Where to start looking for vulnerabilities
Asked where a plant manager or quality director should begin looking for weak spots before FDA finds them, the three sources again offered distinct starting points.
Lennarz said FDA inspectors frequently find violations by comparing a company's written food safety or HACCP plan against what is actually happening on the production floor.
“This is especially common among canned food manufacturers, whose FDA-filed Submission Identifiers don't actually align with their actual production methods,” he noted. “In addition, incomplete production or deviation records as a frequent gap.”
Hancock recommended a broader form of listening. "Start by listening — to your customer complaints, to your staff suggestions for improvement, to regulatory guidance pertaining to your production," he said. "If the FDA can find something, other people will find it also."
Top priorities for identifying risk
Lennarz outlined five specific actions for manufacturers:
- Review written food safety plans against actual floor operations.
- Train staff for FDA inspections, including mock inspections, since "inspections follow a very formulaic process."
- Correct repeated sanitation plan violations before they compound into larger issues.
- Tighten supply chain oversight, including monitoring suppliers for their own violations and switching suppliers when problems recur. “Consider using a third-party software to help monitor your suppliers for violations, particularly since a supplier is unlikely to voluntarily share with you a bad FDA inspection, recalls of their own, detentions, etc.,” said Lennarz.
- Conduct mock recalls to prepare for quickly minimizing damage while working with regulators to protect consumers.
Of those, Lennarz said supplier oversight is most often shortchanged, even at companies that consider themselves compliance-focused. "Simply receiving a third-party food safety scheme certificate is insufficient and only one small part of monitoring your supply chain," he said.
Kingston named three foundational steps: keeping good manufacturing practices, or GMPs, fully up to date; having a recall plan in place before it's needed; and conducting internal or external audits of both GMPs and the recall evaluation process, including mock recalls that clarify who is responsible for what.
He also stressed the importance of a health hazard evaluation once an issue surfaces, since "not all adulterations are created equal." Some manufacturing deviations, he said, carry no meaningful health risk and may only require internal corrections rather than a full recall.
Hancock pointed to two often-missed practices: building a food safety review into every process change, since altering an ingredient, supplier or recipe without that review "too often ends up causing a defect that ends up causing a recall"; and turning documentation into action.
"Companies often tend to collect a lot of information but don't do anything with it," he said, citing environmental test results, cleaning records and third-party audit findings as examples.
Running programs in parallel, not in sequence
All three sources agreed that food safety functions — supplier verification, environmental monitoring, allergen control and label review — cannot be tackled one at a time.
"They all work together," Lennarz said. "And in fact, when one breaks down, it's often linked to another issue." He cited a weak allergen control plan as an example that can lead directly to improper labeling and, in turn, a costly recall.
Kingston was direct on the point: "These should all run in parallel. They're all so important to ensuring safe products. You can't just pick one at a time and get around to the others eventually. That's a recipe for disaster."
Hancock said there is an implied order — knowing which allergens are present will shape label review, for instance — but that sequence doesn't equal priority. "All these things have to be run in parallel to get the full picture of risk mitigation," he said.
Post-market surveillance and separating signal from noise
Ahna Brutlag, a board-certified veterinary toxicologist also with SafetyCall International, emphasized the importance of a sensitive adverse event monitoring system. "You don't want to hear about it on the 6 o'clock news that your product has harmed some number of people or pets," she said.
Brutlag said a sensitive intake system inevitably generates background noise, and companies need internal or external experts to "sort the wheat from the chaff" among reported events. She offered an example: among five adverse event reports — one involving liver cancer, one a single vomiting incident, one a pet's tail falling off — only careful review can determine which, if any, connect to the product itself rather than coincidence.
Kingston agreed that distinguishing signal from noise is critical and cautioned against assuming everything is background noise. "Don't get lulled into thinking everything is background noise and fail to take a closer look at some of those that are trending in a certain way," he said.
What a strong mock recall looks like
Hancock said an effective mock recall must cover the entire process — from issue identification through the decision to recall, communications, notices to trading partners, tracking responses and compiling reports for business and compliance needs. Because a recall is a supply chain event, he said, trading partners should be included in the exercise. Typical audit or trading partner requirements call for running one every six months, he said.
Kingston recommended companies first identify who is responsible for each step of a recall and fill any personnel gaps, whether through internal hires or outside consultants on call for emergencies. How often to run drills, he said, depends on the type of product, since some carry more inherent risk and may need more frequent monitoring.
Lennarz said hiring an outside food safety professional experienced in supplier monitoring, auditing and recall procedures can elevate the seriousness of findings within an organization, even when the results aren't welcome. "It will cost some money, and you may not like all of the findings and recommendations, but having an outside expert can raise the seriousness of an issue to a higher level," he said.
The role of technology
Hancock said interoperable systems, ones that connect a company's detection, traceability, customer data and recall communication tools internally, and that can also communicate with trading partners' systems, are key. "The tools to automate, streamline, and standardize the process already exist," he said. "The remaining work is implementation."
Brutlag agreed that standardized, easily mined data is essential for signal detection, and said artificial intelligence can help sift through large data sets, but only when paired with good underlying data and trained personnel.
"It's very different if a company uses customer service agents with no medical training to take in adverse event data,” she explained. “They're not going to have the qualifications to know what questions to ask. It's garbage in, garbage out."
Lennarz cautioned that documentation software is only as useful as a company's follow-through. "Technology is useless if not properly and thoroughly utilized," he said. "Otherwise, gaps will stand out during an FDA inspection, and those will in turn call into question your entire recordkeeping."
Common misconceptions
Lennarz said too many companies assume they'll never have a recall, believing their production is simple and that front-line workers will consistently follow written protocols. "The reality is that most pet food production still has enough human involvement for errors, intentional or otherwise, to occur," he said.
Hancock agreed and added the biggest misconception is viewing a recall as evidence the system failed, closely followed by the belief that "a recall won't happen to me."
“Risk exists in every supply chain,” he said. “Errors occur even at well-run companies with strong programs in place. Recalls aren't planned, they just happen. The real question is how quickly issues are caught and acted on — that's what protects the business and, more importantly, the animals that consume the product."
