Buyer beware: Dangerous products can linger on store shelves despite a recall

By Brenda Goodman, CNN

(CNN) — I was doing my regular weekly grocery shopping just before Christmas when I happened to cut through the baby formula aisle to get to the dairy section at the back of the store.

Looking up, I saw something that made me double back: at least one can of ByHeart powdered infant formula on the shelf of my local Kroger, with its recall notice from November taped underneath .

I stopped and snapped a photo with my cell phone.

I quickly sent it to my editor and several experts I work with on food safety stories, thinking I’d missed some development, but they all had the same reaction.

“This is nuts,” responded food safety attorney Bill Marler, who is representing several families of babies who developed infant botulism after drinking ByHeart formula. Coincidentally, that same day, he was amending the complaints he had filed to include the retailers where his clients purchased the formula, saying they hadn’t acted fast enough to get it off shelves.

When I sent the photo to Kroger, the company’s press office responded with this statement: “When the recall was issued, we urgently removed the affected product and immediately placed a block at the point of sale to make it impossible for a customer to purchase the recalled item. These measures are part of Kroger’s internal recall protocol [that] ensures compliance with FDA recall guidelines to protect customers.”

I didn’t test the point-of-sale block, since I didn’t try to buy the formula. The company didn’t explain why it had been left on the shelf. I also reported it to the US Food and Drug Administration, through a consumer complaint portal.

Kroger was one of four companies, along with Target, Albertsons and Walmart, that were sent warning letters by the US Food and Drug Administration on December 12, after inspectors found cans and single-serving packs of ByHeart for sale in those stores across 36 states, after all lots of the product were recalled.

It’s not uncommon for companies to have trouble removing recalled products from their shelves. In 2022, the Consumer Product Safety Commission secured a civil penalty from TJX , the corporate parent of TJ Maxx, HomeGoods and Marshalls, of $13 million for selling more than 1,200 units of recalled products — “including hundreds of recalled infant sleepers “known to be deadly,” according to a statement issued by then-CPSC commissioner Peter Feldman.

In a statement, a company spokesperson told CNN: “At TJX, product safety is very important to us and we prohibit the sale of recalled items in our stores. We deeply regret that in some instances between 2014 and 2019, recalled products were not properly removed from our sales floors despite the recall processes that we had in place. We have made a significant investment in people, processes, and technology to strengthen our processes, and have cooperated fully with the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”

Still the case illustrates how products may be available for sale long after a recall.

“This is a problem that is not unfamiliar to CPSC,” Feldman, who is now the commission’s acting chairman, said in an interview last week. “You know, when CPSC recalls a product, it becomes illegal to sell that product.”

Sometimes, stores find it difficult to get the word out to all employees, or they take a lax approach to compliance.

One thing they can do is implement a block — as Kroger said it did — to prevent consumers from being able to purchase the product, even if they reach the register with it.

Feldman noted there have been cases where retailers have been accused of shutting off inventory control software over the weekends, during their busiest sale phase, and engaged in the sale of recalled goods when that inventory control software was turned off, so that the system wasn’t catching inventory that shouldn’t have been sold.

The CPSC and the FDA, with the help of states, often conduct recall effectiveness checks to make sure recalled product isn’t staying in stores or being sold online. But they aren’t performed in every case.

The CSPC also has a dedicated team that patrols websites: its ESAFE team. This team can issue take-down orders if they see recalled goods for sale online. In the past 3 months, they’ve issued 33,000 takedown orders – a 150% increase in orders over the same period in the prior year, Feldman says. Sometimes these orders go to sites that are selling new goods, but they also check sites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace and have those platforms take down listings for recalled products when they find them.

Feldman says two categories of goods deserve particular scrutiny: baby products and electronics.

With baby products, “a number of those products tend to be durable, you know, lasting multiple years,” he said, and they’re only used for a short time, so parents may look to resell them to recoup some of the money they paid.

Before you pick up anything secondhand, it’s a good idea to search the CPSC website to make sure it hasn’t been recalled, Feldman noted.

CPSC recalls have been rising in recent years. In fiscal year 2025, the CPSC posted 357 recalls, up from 238 in 2020 – a roughly 50% increase.

With so many different recalls to track, the government may not have enough manpower to monitor them all.

Highly sensitive, “high severity” products like infant formula should have regulators’ and retailers’ full attention, said Frank Yiannis, former FDA deputy commissioner of food policy and response.

If you haven’t been following the evolution of the ByHeart story as closely as a health reporter, here’s the catch-up. On November 11, 2025, all lots of ByHeart Whole Nutrition powdered infant formula were recalled. There shouldn’t be any on shelves anywhere.

This followed an investigation by the California Department of Public Health, the FDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which determined that there were an unusually high number of infant botulism cases in babies drinking ByHeart formula. Testing of opened cans by public health officials, and subsequent testing of unopened cans by the company, identified the bacteria that causes botulism poisoning.

Infant botulism is a serious illness that develops when an infant ingests spores of the botulinum bacteria, which then colonize the baby’s underdeveloped gut and begin producing a toxin. This toxin slowly poisons nerves. It can take several weeks for symptoms to appear. These include constipation, fussiness at feeding and a weak cry. They can progress to loss of head control and loss of control over the muscles of their face.

Through December 17, the FDA says 51 infants in 19 states have been affected, though cases seem to have slowed in recent weeks. All were hospitalized. There have been no deaths in large part because of a product called Baby Botulism Immune Globulin intravenous, or BabyBIG, distributed by the California Department of Public Health, which gives infants the immune boost they need to fight the toxin. But the product is expensive, and even when it works, babies can face weeks in the hospital and months of physical therapy to recover.

It’s not clear if any were fed formula purchased after the recall.

“It’s disappointing to find that on store shelves weeks after the recall,” said Yiannis, who oversaw food safety as an executive at Walmart before joining the FDA.

Yiannis, who left the agency in 2023 after being involved with a massive recall of infant formula linked to cronobacter infections, said in the case of ByHeart, there was “plenty of blame to go around.”

First, he said the company and the FDA were slow to recall all lots of the product. Originally, the company recalled two lots and only broadened the recall three days later.

He said state and federal regulators suspected that the number and distribution of the cases didn’t seem to align with just two lots of product being involved.

He said the two-step recall likely created confusion because many stores probably didn’t understand that all lots of the product had been recalled.

Yiannis said the FDA was also slow to get its state partners on a call. They didn’t host a 50-state call to share distribution lists until nearly a week into the recall. The delay was first reported by Healthbeat. The states are largely responsible for doing recall effectiveness checks. That slowed efforts to survey stores.

The FDA said it carried out more than 4,000 of these checks alongside its state and local partners “to ensure recalled product was not being made available to consumers.”

But rather than doing these spot checks, Yiannis said, we should be using technology to improve.

“We are living in a day and age where we have new emerging technology that allows us to do better than this,” Yiannis said. He points to RFID tags which can be placed on products, allowing stores to track the products more carefully.

He says a new food traceability rule, implemented while he was at FDA, was slated to go into effect in January, but the Trump administration has delayed it until 2028. It was intended to speed the identification and removal of contaminated products from the market.

The FDA has announced a different initiative, Operation Stork Speed, which will review nutrients in baby formula and step up testing for heavy metals and other contaminants. The US Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

In an update on the recall posted on its website on Tuesday, ByHeart said: “First and most importantly: we are deeply sorry for the distress and challenges this event has caused our customers, our partners, our retailers, and everyone connected to the ByHeart brand.”

The company said independent testing identified botulinum spores in 6 out of 36 finished product samples tested. They said they have paused all production while they audit their supply chain for possible sources of the contamination. ByHeart also urges parents continue to monitor babies for symptoms of infant botulism.

“A recall is the last line of defense, separating consumers from foodborne illness. But if the freaking companies can’t get it right – and these are not small companies – we are really in trouble,” said Sandra Eskin, CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Stop Foodborne Illness.

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