Plastic pieces in a frozen veggie burger — and it’s two MorningStar Farms varieties, not one. This is Food Recall Watch. After a week of pathogens and allergens, today's hazard is something you can actually see — and we'll tell you exactly which lots to pull from the freezer. Here's SpartanNash:
MORNINGSTAR FARMS is voluntarily recalling two varieties of products because of possible plastic pieces in the food. No other MORNINGSTAR FARMS brand products are affected by the recall. People who purchased affected product should discard it and contact the company for a full refund.
MorningStar Farms is voluntarily recalling two product varieties over possible plastic pieces in the food — the notice came through SpartanNash, dated June 19th, and it's a Class II recall. Class II — the FDA's read is the risk of serious harm is low but not zero. After this week, the distinction matters: we're dealing with a physical hazard here, instead of a pathogen or an allergen. Different trigger entirely. And here's my gripe — SpartanNash is a distributor. Their stores run under banners like Family Fare, Martin's, and D&W across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Seeing "SpartanNash" on a notice doesn't tell me whether it touched my cart. Two varieties. So if you checked one MorningStar box in your freezer and felt safe, you didn't check the other. That's your re-check right there. And the move is the same wherever you bought it — discard it, then call Consumer Affairs at 800-962-0120 for a full refund. Check the brand and the lot, not just the store. When a recall gets bigger after the first announcement — like we keep seeing with these frozen meals — does that mean something new went wrong, or are officials just following the same problem farther down the supply chain? And honestly, should I be yanking stuff out of my freezer that I already checked once? Almost always, it's the second one — investigators trace the same root problem into more products and more production lots than they caught at first. The Ajinomoto frozen meal situation is a good example: what started in February as a relatively contained action over glass fragments found by shoppers grew into a recall of nearly 37 million pounds of fried rice, dumplings, and ramen sold under five major brands, including Trader Joe's and Kroger store-brand products, per reporting on the March expansion. Then, weeks later, a separate amended notice added roughly 10 million more pounds of Trader Joe's Vegetable Fried Rice alone — glass fragments ranging from one to three centimeters — distributed across 43 states. The hazard didn't change; officials kept widening the footprint of the affected product as they worked backward through production records. You see it with outbreak-linked recalls, too: more than 60 frozen products were added to a Salmonella-linked recall in a single September update, per Food Safety News, because investigators kept finding the contamination in additional SKUs from the same supply chain. So if I checked my freezer during the first recall wave and thought I was clear, that check is basically stale now? Exactly — a clean check on day one doesn't stay clean if the recall expands. With the Ajinomoto situation, look up UPC 00521482 for Trader Joe's Vegetable Fried Rice, with best-by dates running from February 28 through November 19. Per the recall notice, don't eat it; return it or throw it out for a full refund. And with any ongoing or expanding recall, re-check your freezer against the updated lot codes every time a new notice drops, not just when you first hear about it. If you’ve spotted a recall we should be tracking, or you have feedback, a story idea, or a correction, send us a note at foodrecallwatch at lantern podcasts dot com. We do read them.
You’ll find links to every recall and source we mentioned today in the show notes. If any of this might affect your kitchen, pantry, or shopping list, take a minute to read the full notice there.
That’s Food Recall Watch for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.