Every year, food products are pulled from shelves due to safety recalls. These recalls happen for many reasons, from unlabeled allergens to detected pathogen contamination in food processing facilities.1 Recalls are an expensive and wasteful affair: a single recall can cost a company over $10 million in direct costs alone.2 Beyond the dollars, there is the staggering waste of food. In just the first half of 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the destruction of nearly 85 million units of food over safety concerns.3 Often, all that food ends up in landfills, even if it might have been safe to eat.
Foodborne pathogens can be detected either after an outbreak has occurred or, ideally, before contaminated products reach consumers. In this preventive approach, companies err on the side of caution. If a lab test suggests that a pathogen might be present in a product, the only safe move is to issue a recall and throw out the product. But what if some of those positive test results are false alarms?