“The fact is that salmonella contamination is costly, and if there are recalls and people are embarrassed that they are producing food that is making people sick or killing them, they might want to change their behavior,” Marler said.
Susanne Rust of the LA Times wrote: “When food safety groups mentioned salmonella contamination, the poultry industry protested.”
• A new report shows salmonella is widespread in U.S. poultry production, and major brands like Costco are regularly exceeding federal safety standards.
• USDA does not have the authority to enforce salmonella standards or stop sales. Inspectors can only record violations.
• When the government reclassified E. coli into a more serious category, recoveries increased and disease cases decreased.
A new report based on government testing documents shows salmonella is widespread in chicken and turkey products in U.S. grocery stores. However, because of the way the pathogen is classified, the federal government does not have the authority to do much about it.
Farm Forward, an organization that advocates for farmers’ rights and humane farm practices, released a report this week examining five years of monthly U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections of major U.S. poultry plants. Many plants, including those that process and sell poultry under brand names such as Foster Farms, Costco and Perdue, have found levels of salmonella routinely exceed maximum standards set by the federal government.
“USDA is knowingly allowing millions of packages of chicken contaminated with salmonella to be sold in major brand stores,” said Andrew deCoriolis, USDA executive director.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.3 million Americans get sick each year from eating food contaminated with salmonella. Most people experience only mild symptoms, but some people experience diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting. Every year, about 19,000 people are hospitalized and about 420 people die from eating infected food.
Chicken and turkey account for nearly a quarter of all salmonella infections, according to a 2021 government report on food illnesses.
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service inspects poultry plants monthly. Five U.S. poultry plants exceeded maximum allowable salmonella contamination each month from 2020 to 2024, according to a new report. These include a turkey plant owned by Butterball in Carthage, Missouri, a turkey plant in Dayton, Virginia, a turkey plant owned by Cargill Meat Solutions and a chicken plant owned by Koch Foods in Cunning, Georgia. Costco’s chicken producer, Lincoln Premium Poultry, exceeded standards in 54 of 59 tests.
“At Lincoln Premium Poultry, the safety of our products is a top priority,” Jessica Kolterman, the company’s managing director, said in an email. “The updated and published USDA report will demonstrate that our position has been strengthened….We will continue to improve our processes.”
A Butterball spokesperson said the company “takes food safety very seriously and complies with all USDA and FSIS regulations and inspection protocols.” A spokesperson said the facility is under strict and ongoing oversight and “continuously reviews and improves its food safety program to ensure it meets or exceeds government standards.”
Cargill, Perdue and Koch Foods did not respond to requests for comment. Foster Farms referred questions to the National Chicken Council, an industry trade group.
“Consumers need not worry,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the Chicken Council. He called the report “unscientific” and described Farm Forward as “an activist organization whose goal is to end commercial poultry farming.”
Bill Mattos, president of Super and the California Poultry Federation, said poultry is safe when cooked to 160 degrees and that knives, cutting boards and other items that may have come in contact with raw meat are disinfected and cleaned.
“All chicken is safe to eat if handled and cooked properly,” Mattos said, adding that each year, “Californians eat more chicken than any other state… that’s 110 pounds per person!”
The report also suggests that the federal government’s standards for acceptable levels of salmonella are excessively high and could potentially put U.S. poultry consumers at risk.
For ground chicken, the USDA allows 25% of factory samples to be contaminated. For ground turkey, it’s 13.5%. Chicken parts should not exceed 15.4% of contaminated samples, compared to 9.8% for whole chicken.
“You don’t know, but it seems like common sense that if you allow a lot of salmonella, a lot of people are going to get sick,” said Bill Marler, an attorney at Marler Clark, a national food safety law firm.
When inspectors visit a plant, they do not assess the bacterial load on the meat, nor do they determine the types of bacteria found in the product. They just test for the presence of bacteria. Whether bacteria are present or not.
There are hundreds of strains, or serotypes, of Salmonella, according to Marler and Maurice Pitesky, poultry science experts at UC Davis. Although most are considered harmless, approximately 30 are known to be potentially fatal to humans.
As a result, the USDA survey doesn’t provide a clear picture of what’s out there, Pitesky said.
“When I hear that there is salmonella, I think, ‘Okay, first question: I want to know the serotype. What kind of serotype is it?’ because that’s really the relevant information,” he said.
If inspectors find that a plant exceeds salmonella standards, there is little they can do other than document it. The agency has no authority to enforce the standards.
Marler said the agency decided to classify the bacteria as an adulterant in the 1990s after four children died and hundreds of people became sick from eating E. coli-contaminated beef sold at Jack in the Box restaurants. The designation means the USDA can stop selling contaminated products or close plants that fail inspections.
He said the beef industry initially held back for fear of losing money. It was like that at first.
He said the USDA has begun retail testing. “For a while it felt like there was a recall a week, you know… 50, 100, a thousand pounds here, a million pounds there, even 10 million pounds there.” But eventually, companies “started testing their products and implementing interventions to eliminate it. And you know what? The number of E. coli cases associated with burgers plummeted.”
He said he now sees cases occasionally.
“I look at that and think that if we eliminate salmonella from chicken, maybe those cases will go down,” he said.
Pitesky said salmonella is very difficult to eliminate. They can be introduced into flocks of wild animals such as birds, rats, mice and other wild animals. It is also found in the intestines, skin, feathers, and feet of chickens, and is spread among chickens when they move around in feces, urine, and shared bedding.
But Marler thinks it can be controlled.
“Yeah, it’s difficult,” he said. “But you can do a lot of things. And this might make people angry, but you can eradicate the salmonella swarms. They do that all the time in the EU.”
The European Union considers Salmonella an impurity and requires producers to reduce and control it through biosecurity, testing, vaccination, recall and depopulation.
“The fact is that salmonella contamination is costly, and if there are recalls and people are embarrassed that they are producing food that is making people sick or killing them, they might want to change their behavior,” he said.
This post by William Marler first appeared on Marler Blog October 30, 2025; And I repost it here with permission.
