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.
Click here 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.
Related: Sexual harassment, union busting, and a spotty safety record: The dark side of working at 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 purchasing in bulk from a handful of well-vetted suppliers. Such a system should give Trader Joe’s excellent command of its supply chain, says Marler. “A company with fewer SKUs tends to have tighter control, fewer recalls, and fewer outbreaks,” he explained. That Trader Joe’s keeps sourcing products that end up in big recalls suggests that the company may be choosing suppliers based on criteria that prioritize other factors over food safety.
“It’s more than bad luck,” Marler says, “when you have that many product recalls so quickly.”
The sugar-coated screw in the box of doughnut holes
In March, workers at a Trader Joe’s location in New York City’s Murray Hill neighborhood say a shopper complained about the new Glazed Chocolate Donut Holes, a product sweeping social media because of what wasn’t supposed to be in the pink-wrapped trays: any gluten or dairy. Employees we interviewed said the shopper told managers, who in turn told corporate, that she found a sugar-coated metal screw inside the box of doughnut holes (not inside the doughnut hole itself). What happened next, workers say, is representative of how Trader Joe’s tends to handle product safety matters.
At the Murray Hill store, crew members said they were instructed to dispose of the remaining doughnut holes. But employees interviewed by Fast Company at other stores said they never received any official corporate notification about potential hazards with the product. Online, however, some employees at other stores reported that their managers announced a “quality issue” with the doughnut holes.
Around the same time, some workers noticed that the package’s best-by date was also very wrong (“2025-07-23” for a product expiring in March 2024). In one store, staff we spoke to said they were instructed to cover the old date with stickers showing a new date giving the product the normal four-day shelf life. But many locations kept selling their doughnut holes without any changes, while a procession of influencers posted videos—sometimes with the box’s wrong best-by date visible—declaring the treats inside to be a “10 out of 10,” “20 out of 10,” even “100 out of 10.”
Meanwhile, in one of five Trader Joe’s warehouses on the West Coast, workers received instructions from their facility managers to check the doughnut holes not for screws but for “pieces of string.”
When Fast Company asked Trader Joe’s which hazards employees and customers reported, and by which date(s), the company declined to comment. Whatever issues the doughnut holes had, they did not trigger a recall—which would have marked Trader Joe’s fifth in 30 days.
A striking—and well-documented—lack of transparency
Trader Joe’s has distinguished itself as arguably America’s least forthcoming grocery brand, receiving the industry’s lowest marks for transparency from consumer watchdogs in multiple categories. The Humane Society has given it a -7.2 (on a scale of -80 to 210) for its disclosure of animal welfare practices. The Climate-Friendly Supermarkets program has given it two 0s out of 100 for its “complete lack of transparency” on emissions. Green America has failed it for not having a publicly available plan to end child labor in the cocoa supply chain. A coalition of top U.S. public health advocacy groups has given it an F for its transparency on antibiotics use, and Toxic-Free Future has awarded it 0 of 400 points for not revealing the actions being taken to make its products and packaging safer.
Related: Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why your favorite grocery store is not what you think
Trader Joe’s has taken some proactive steps. For instance, it has banned five categories of ingredients: artificial flavors, preservatives, GMOs, partially hydrogenated oils, and MSG. But the FDA banned partially hydrogenated oils in 2018, and “preservative” is a generic term that doesn’t mean much on its own. Whole Foods, for example, publishes a detailed list of the 300-plus specific preservatives, sweeteners, colorings, and other ingredients it bans.
Trader Joe’s website offers consumers 182 words’ worth of “Some General Thoughts on Food Safety.” Its Product FAQs page delves into the details of only one quality-assurance protocol: how it enforces the GMO ban, in place since 2001, when public concerns over “Frankenfoods” were peaking. When working with vendors that use genetically engineered ingredients in their facilities, Trader Joe’s says it requires “affidavits, identity-preserved certification of seed stock, and third-party lab results” verifying GMOs won’t taint its products. “We conduct random audits of items with potentially suspect ingredients,” it adds, “using an outside, third-party lab to perform the testing.”
But to guard against salmonella, undeclared allergens, or any number of different unwelcome foreign objects, Trader Joe’s is silent on its auditing procedures. This raises practical questions—for instance, if Trader Joe’s believes GMOs represent a singular enough threat to warrant the only published guidelines explaining how it bans them, why did the company begin carrying Impossible Burgers, with their famous genetically modified heme, back in 2020? But more crucially, it points to broader problems that can arise from a culture of secrecy.
Product sourcing: “Our name will stand for something and mean something”
In his 2021 memoir, Becoming Trader Joe, founder Joe Coulombe wrote that he wanted Trader Joe’s to be a “chain of neighborhood stores” that “appeal to very special customers.” The shopper’s reward would be an escape from the “national brands” and, by association, the “masses who willingly consumed” mainstream products.
To achieve this, the company developed a competitive private label to challenge Big Food. “Our name will stand for something and mean something, and we’re going to build products to show that,” vice president of marketing Matt Sloan explained on the Inside Trader Joe’s podcast in 2023. The employee handbook notes that, under the Trader Joe’s brand, “we control what goes into those products (and what doesn’t),” leading to “excellent everyday values” that “make us a favorite destination for customers.”
Today, Trader Joe’s says 85% to 95% of products carry its private label. For comparison, a recent study found that private-label items comprise an average of 26% of shelf offerings at grocery stores across the industry. Trader Joe’s doesn’t publicly reveal the origins of these products but claims they are top-notch items the company thoroughly investigates before stocking them.
Private labels began “as a way for other retail grocers to have something that competed with national brands,” Sloan explained in 2023. “It was often a lesser-than version of those national brands, and Trader Joe’s came along and flipped that whole story on its head and said, ‘We think this product is so good, we want our name on it.’”
Polls show the vast majority of American consumers—more than three-quarters—desire transparency about ingredients and how food products are made. Grocery companies have tried to meet that desire in different ways. Ten years ago, Whole Foods published its first vendor manual: a 28-page guide listing the third-party verifications suppliers needed to obtain before getting into Whole Foods and the scores they should meet on a new Responsibly Grown Index that measures everything from pest management and waste reduction to farmworker welfare.
Walmart currently publishes its supplier standards and code of conduct, plus a more extensive set of private-label requirements. H-E-B even operates a public Manufacturing Academy of Excellence whose multiday supplier trainings for safe food handling have won awards from food industry association FMI’s Safe Quality Food Institute. Unlike its competitors, Trader Joe’s does not publish a vendor code of conduct or reveal the manufacturing requirements suppliers must adhere to.
Trader Joe’s guards the identities of its private-label partners, which is common practice in the industry. These partners (of Trader Joe’s as well as other large grocers) are frequently big-name manufacturers who would rather the public not know they also produce a lower-priced version of their branded product, often by quietly substituting cheaper ingredients. While Fast Company wasn’t able to review the manufacturing specifications these companies agreed to in their contracts with Trader Joe’s, we were able to identify some of them from packing and distribution records, as well as FDA recall notices and other methods.
Here are some of those suppliers:
- Coca-Cola for beverages
- PepsiCo for fruit smoothies and its Frito-Lay subsidiary for packaged snacks
- Slim Jim and Chef Boyardee maker Conagra Brands for other packaged goods
- Campbell’s for soups
- McDonald’s fry supplier Simplot for frozen potatoes, tater tots, and hash browns
- Mega-processor Taylor Farms for salad greens—recently in the spotlight for the massive E. coli onion outbreak linked to Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Burger King
- Trident Seafoods, the nation’s largest seafood company, for smoked salmon and other fish products
- Ajinomoto, the international food giant best known for commercializing MSG, for fried rice and the best-selling Mandarin Orange Chicken
- Schwan’s (maker of Red Baron pizzas and Mrs. Smith’s pies) for the recently recalled soup dumplings
- Costco’s rotisserie chicken producer Foster Farms, owned by private equity firm Atlas Holdings, for poultry products
Trader Joe’s also buys offbeat products from smaller entrepreneurs, and we learned many of their identities as well. Trader Joe’s is not alone in either of these practices. Every grocery chain follows a similar approach. The difference is that more than 85% of Trader Joe’s products are private label, versus only about a quarter across the industry.
And if these national brands do produce a significant proportion of Trader Joe’s product, then its aisles start to look a lot less distinguishable from those at Stop & Shop, Ralphs, and in a different way, Walmart. The discount giant is increasingly stocking niche food brands alongside a new private label, Bettergoods, that vows to deliver “new and exciting flavors and concepts” that are “totally unique to Walmart.”
According to Trader Joe’s, what its manufacturing partners of all sizes share in common is they present a money-saving opportunity to pass along to shoppers. Where that opportunity lies in an industry whose profit margins can sink to 1% raises questions—particularly among workers who spoke to Fast Company—about what kind of corner cutting this opacity might hide in their employer’s supply chain.
For example, Trader Joe’s chicken supplier listed above, Foster Farms, was implicated this October for animal welfare violations after workers were filmed hurling live birds across the broiler houses and bulldozing them with forklifts. This followed USDA inspectors documenting “egregious” examples of other mistreatment since at least 2017, including scalding birds alive.
Corner cutting could also compromise food safety. BrucePac, a big wholesaler to clients stretching from school districts to 7-Eleven and Walmart, recalled 12 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products in October over listeria fears—more than the Boar’s Head recall that got much more press attention. Trader Joe’s stocked 19 different products that contained BrucePac’s precooked chicken, from chow mein to eight packaged salads to a heat-and-serve Chicken Enchiladas Verde dish, a product that Trader Joe’s had already recalled just 10 months earlier.
For that recall in February, Trader Joe’s announced that a cheesemaker, Rizo-López Foods, had provided Trader Joe’s with cotija possibly tainted with listeria. This cheese had been used to make the chicken enchiladas, two salads, and a cilantro dressing. The outbreak was linked to 26 cases of listeriosis across 11 states, resulting in two deaths.
It is unclear how long Trader Joe’s was using Rizo-López’s ingredients. But last month, a federal court forced this producer to shutter its entire operation. Health officials had tested the listeria responsible for the factory’s cotija recall and discovered it was the same strain that had caused a series of unsolved deadly listeria outbreaks going back an entire decade. The FDA matched it to incidents in 2014, 2017, and 2021 that killed two more people and sickened dozens of others.
Cutting off supplier access: A “radical feature”
Starting in 1977, Trader Joe’s made a strategic move that Coulombe called “one of the most radical features” in its grocery stores. It cut off suppliers’ store access. The company didn’t want suppliers doing last-mile deliveries on their own schedule, or agitating in person for better shelf space. “[Suppliers] wanted to run your store,” Coulombe declared in his memoir.
Instead, Trader Joe’s built an in-house distribution network. Today, these facilities act as a firewall between vendors and stores while enabling much smaller retail footprints (and therefore lower real estate costs) in upscale neighborhoods. The company says it works to source fresh items “as close to our stores as we can,” but this neglects to note that effectively everything sold at Trader Joe’s 560 locations in 42 states and Washington, D.C., has passed through the doors of about a dozen facilities concentrated on the two coasts and in two central states.
Each day, trucks drive pallets of produce, packaged goods, and frozen entrées for store crew members to unload. What’s on Denver-area shelves, for instance, arrives at minimum from a warehouse 800 miles away. Sources say the so-called day bread often presumed to be baked fresh is actually, like the doughnut holes, frozen inside the warehouses. These facilities also house kitchens in which teams chop, season, mix, and assemble many of Trader Joe’s salads, sandwiches, and other ready-to-eat items—explaining how the same enchiladas could be recalled for two different listeria strains found in completely unrelated factories.
Store crew members described moving and unloading pallets delivered daily from these warehouses as a low point of their workday—though not solely due to the physical labor. “We get pallets where it looks like the boxes were hit by a bus,” said Jamie Edwards, president of the Trader Joe’s United union and a worker in Massachusetts. A former worker in Boston who unloaded dry goods on the late shift recalled the pallets being such a recurrent disaster that they would jokingly ask: Was this an SOS from people up the supply chain? “We used to say it felt like the warehouse team was sending cries for help,” she told us. Trader Joe’s declined to comment on any of these allegations.
In Burlington, Vermont, former Trader Joe’s store employee Zac Whidby said they used to joke about how many pallets would fail a standard quality-control test. He said some contained dead mice, others living spiders. Despite the rules capping pallets at 6 feet in height, Whidby shared a photo of a stack so tall—about 9 feet—that it toppled when they moved it. One day, he said they encountered a pallet with broken garlic jars that had transformed into “black and green sludge,” creating an eye-watering stench throughout the back room. He says his manager suggested they salvage unbroken jars for sale.