A Quaker Oats facility might have had salmonella contamination for years, FDA says

Salmonella may have been present over the past four years in an Illinois factory that was responsible for a major recall of Quaker Oats products late last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed in warning letter it sent to Quaker Oat’s parent company PepsiCo in June.

In the letter that was published online on Tuesday, the FDA warned that the closure of the Quaker Oats plant in Danville was not enough to reduce the risk of contamination at other factories. Quaker Oats said in April it planned to shutter the factory and layoff hundreds of employees.

Quaker Oats did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company initially issued a recall of millions of granola bar and cereal products in December over the potential contamination.

Workers at the factory found a granola bar that tested positive for salmonella in November. A PepsiCo lab confirmed the contamination in December.

A few days later, FDA inspectors found salmonella in a crack on the floor of the factory. Quaker Oats then acknowledged that it had detected the same strain of salmonella in the facility since at least 2020, indicating the strain could have survived all that time, the FDA wrote.

The company also found the same strain in 13 environmental samples since 2022. However, the source of contamination was never identified.

The FDA is now asking Quaker Oats to “evaluate if similar corrective actions are necessary in your other plants to reduce the likelihood of contamination.”

Salmonella is a bacteria that can make people sick with salmonellosis. There about 1.35 million cases of salmonellosis, with 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).