Higher Likelihood of Recall for Organic, Natural Products?

WASHINGTON--Products labeled "organic" or "all natural" are eight times more likely to be recalled for safety-related problems than conventional foods, according to a review conducted by the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues (www.hudson.org). The review included nine months of data--encompassing August 2001 to April 2002--gathered from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada recall records. The review was conducted after Alex Avery, director of research at the center, and colleagues noticed a trend for organic and natural products to be the subject of warnings and recalls.

According to Avery's data compilation, organic and natural foods made up 9 percent of total food safety warnings in April, 22 percent in March, 2 percent in February and 7 percent in January. The statement that organic and natural products are eight times more likely to be recalled was based on the fact that, compared to the conventional food market, organic and natural food makes up a very small percentage of the U.S. and Canadian food market.

"I don't want to claim these numbers have any greater precision than they actually do," Avery said. "Organic is widely considered to be about 1 percent of the U.S. and Canadian food supply, so if they make up 8.5 percent of the warnings and recalls, that's disproportionate to their total share of the food market."

For the purpose of Avery's review, products labeled as organic or natural were included in that category for comparison to conventional products. "This is where it gets a bit fuzzy," Avery said. "It's very difficult to know what the total percentage of products are organic and natural. ... We went by what the [label] stated."

Reasons listed in the report for recalls of organic and natural products included failure to label products with allergenicity information, mislabeling, bacterial contamination and other safety-related concerns. "There were similar recalls for the non-organic and -natural products throughout this whole time," Avery noted. "I want to emphasize [the fact that] the North American food market is still the safest in the world by many accounts. This indicates that the system that both Canada and the U.S. have in place, which the retailers and manufacturers work with, works quite well. These manufacturers and product retailers are proud of the fact that they are very vigilant about recalls and warnings."

The report also indicated that some retailers--Whole Foods Markets, specifically--had multiple violations for the same products. In a statement, the center urged consumers to be aware of food recalls, but to keep in mind that the Canadian and U.S. food systems are among the safest in the world. The center also mentioned a U.S. Centers for Disease Control report from February that demonstrated a five-year decline in the number of food-borne illnesses.

In response to Avery's report, the Organic Trade Association (OTA) released a statement, saying, "[OTA] objects to using faulty logic and fuzzy math to scare consumers away from organic products, a healthful and ecologically sound category of products. 'Organic' and 'natural' on labels do not mean the same thing, yet Alex Avery repeatedly lumps these categories together. Based on the information he presents (a few minutes of fact checking revealed errors in his report), there is no way to draw any conclusions about the relative likelihood of a recall of an organic product. ... [R]epeated abuses of statistics result in completely erroneous conclusions that are not to be believed."