Earlier this week, the Minnesota Department of Health announced an ongoing investigation into jalapeños due to potential Salmonella javiana contamination. At the time, they had worked with FDA and were told the affected product had been removed from restaurants where it was served, including a few large chains and some smaller Mexican-style restaurants. But on Wednesday, the FDA announced that the outbreak was larger (345 cases) and linked to jalapeños from Sinaloa, Mexico distributed by Coast Citrus in 27 states. The majority of these cases are from Minnesota and Colorado, which each had 110 illnesses.
We know many of our clients across the country received recall notices this week. If you did get recalled jalapeños, it’s important to clean and sanitize any surface or container that the product touched since salmonella can survive on surfaces for weeks if they are regularly wet or moist (or up to 32 hours in dry environments).
Some of our clients are subbing domestic jalapeños if available. The caveat is that it’s a challenging time from a harvest perspective – only a limited domestic supply is ready for another few weeks (just the Southwest harvest, which began in late June). We are not aware of any food safety issues with domestic supply.
A few clients have pulled jalapeños completely, either for the optics or related to procurement issues and delivery logistics. Some pulled them because they only buy partial cases, which sometimes lack lot numbers and so couldn’t be verified. Others pulled all products from the supplier, Coast Citrus, and their subsidiary, Coast Tropical.
We don’t have any evidence that this goes further than jalapeños from Sinaloa, Mexico, and distributed by Coast Citrus right now. But we’re hearing that more local health departments are conducting surprise visits this week, asking restaurants if they had these jalapeños, how they discarded them and sanitized key areas, and whether they have sick employees or guest complaints. From what we can tell, this is across the board (and the country) - from Mexican-style chains to sandwich shops and steakhouses. It’s an interesting (over?)reaction that we’re keeping an eye on. We don’t think they know more about the scope of this than we do, so it might just be misinformation and lack of federal guidance to state health departments about what action to take. Given the high visibility of recent outbreaks like Cyclospora, this might just be a way for local sanitarians to show that they’re trying to do something to protect the public.
If a health department visits, clients can chat in the ZHH App for support from 6am to midnight Eastern from our clinical team, or reply here with questions. Hang in there!
Mexican produce is in the spotlight, but it may just be a numbers game – one third of U.S. fruit and veggie imports are from Mexico. FDA inspects about 2% of imports, and actually tests far less than that…
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