Consumer Reports: Top 10 Riskiest Foods Based on Recalls, Foodborne Illness Outbreaks
Advocacy group Consumer Reports (CR) has compiled a list of the ten most high-risk foods, based on recall and foodborne illness outbreak data collected from federal food regulatory agencies.
For its analysis, CR used an in-house data extraction software to pull data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). CR included data on food recalls and foodborne illness outbreaks occurring from January 2017–December 2022, focusing on incidents linked to a microbiological origin. To rank the risk posed by the foods identified in its analysis, CR considered 1) the number of recalls and/or outbreaks caused by a certain food items, 2) the number of illnesses and deaths associated with specific foodborne disease outbreaks, as well as the number of states in which such outbreaks occurred, and 3) the amount of a certain food item affected by relevant recalls and outbreaks.