A Canadian food safety agency announced this week that an artisanal cheesemaker had recalled its entire product line as a precaution, after several severe listeriosis cases were traced back to its soft-paste cheeses. We're not naming the company, and the details of that specific investigation aren't ours to relitigate. What is worth pulling out for our members is the pattern underneath it: soft-paste cheeses carry a listeria risk that doesn't announce itself. A contaminated wheel can look, smell, and taste completely normal.
That invisibility is exactly why a written recall plan matters more for soft and washed-rind styles than for hard, aged cheeses that spend months developing acidity and low moisture that discourage the pathogen. If your program includes anything soft-paste, bloomy, or washed-rind, this is a good week to ask a blunt question: if you needed to pull a batch today, do you actually know how fast you could trace it, notify accounts, and account for every unit that shipped?
What a real recall plan actually contains
A recall plan isn't a paragraph in your food safety manual that says "we will recall product if necessary." It's a specific, rehearsed procedure: who makes the call to initiate a recall and under what evidence, how you identify every account and customer who received the affected lot, what language you use in the notification so it's accurate without being alarmist, and how you document the whole sequence for regulators afterward. Most members we talk to have the first piece — someone's clearly in charge — and are much thinner on the rest.
The agencies that track recalls consistently note the same failure pattern: producers who can trace a lot number back to a specific day's make move fast and contain the problem to a handful of accounts. Producers relying on memory or informal notes end up pulling wider date ranges than necessary, which costs more and worries more customers than the situation may actually call for. That gap is almost entirely about recordkeeping habits built well before any recall is ever needed.
What we'd ask you to do this week
Pull your own recall plan, if you have a written one, and read it as if you were executing it under real time pressure rather than reviewing it calmly at a desk. Does it name specific people rather than roles that might be vacant? Does it tell you exactly where your distribution records live? If you don't have one written down at all, don't wait for your own incident to be the reason you build it — a slow week in late winter is a much better time to draft it than the middle of an active recall.
Our Food Safety Committee keeps a simple recall-plan template members can adapt, and several members who've actually run a recall, thankfully a small one, are willing to talk through what worked and what didn't.
Next step: find your written recall plan today, or start one if it doesn't exist, and test it against a hypothetical batch before you ever need it against a real one.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.