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Costco’s butter recall, explained
- michaelbarton 2y agoI thought this noteworthy because butter is made from milk as the sole ingredient
- iefbr14 2y agoDon't worry, they will stick a label on it and it will go back to the shops. It's a good lesson for the supplier making the mistake. And besides, one might think it ís a harmless milk substitute..
- snarbles 2y agoNot all recalls involve disposing of a product. Apparently in this case it does. I'd have thought they could just send out some correction stickers to slap on there, but I suppose food labeling laws could be too rigid to allow for this, or else concerns about stickers being misapplied.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alsetmusic 2y agoWhich, I would expect, ought to be well known by anyone shopping with lactose issues. It’s like shipping peanut brittle without a label saying that it contains peanuts. How many people would really be harmed without the recall? I’m in favor of safety over profit. I’m just bummed at the unnecessary waste.
- bobthepanda 2y agoa lot of the alternative product packaging looks very similar to traditional dairy butter packaging
- assimpleaspossi 2y agoThat sounds like an issue for the alternative people to solve.
- YeBanKo 2y agoIt actually lists milk as an ingredient. So even if you are have doubts if its milkless butter, the ingredient list can clarify it.
- 8note 2y agoIf you see that on a product, you'd expect that the thing was made with milk, but does not contain any as far as you need to worry about allergens, and that it's tested to be safe. It's a valid case in the truth table where somebody with a milk allergy should be safe to eat it
- josephcsible 2y agoDoes any such food product actually exist? Not even just for milk, but for any of the FDA's nine major allergens?
- dialup_sounds 2y agoYou will find that even butter often does not have milk in the ingredients list. E.g. Kerrygold: "pasteurized cream, salt" In this case, the Kirkland's listed "sweet cream" and not milk.
- jvanderbot 2y agoIt is occasionally difficult to tell from the label whether you are buying margarine or butter. And some margarine contains milk and is therefore not OK for lactose intolerant folks. But still, I agree this sounds crazy.
- kstrauser 2y agoBut this wasn't margarine. It was butter. The package is labeled Kirkland Signature Butter.
- jvanderbot 2y agoWhere precisely did I go wrong here? We know it's butter, but a consumer might not, therefore a "contains whatever" label is not totally unjustified. Once you accept that as a rule, you have to enforce it. You don't just enforce it where it's ambiguous, you enforce it on all brands.
- pessimizer 2y agoI could believe that "Signature Butter" could be a substance that wasn't butter. It would be dumb, but I wouldn't give you odds it didn't happen if someone claimed it did. So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."
- _3u10 2y agoThat's not really accurate, most butter has salt, water, and sometimes a few other ingredients like lactic cultures, but milk is definitely always an ingredient.
- blinded 2y agowaste of resources. youd think they could add a sticker to it at the store instead.
- userbinator 2y agoIMHO this is getting close to the most surprising example of bureaucratic-red-tape-gone-wild I've seen, which is a "may contain traces of peanuts" warning on a jar of peanut butter.
- 43920 2y agoThat’s not stupid though. It might seem obvious, but then you have things like sun butter, which are specifically designed to imitate peanut butter while not having peanuts. Sure, you can look at all the words on the package and ingredients and figure out if something probably contains allergens, but the point of the rule is that it gives you one standardized line of text that you can read and be 100% certain whether something is safe for you to eat or not.
- readthenotes1 2y agoThen that SunButter should probably be probably labeled contains no milk. The absence of that one standard line of text would not be enough for me if my life were on the line.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago> Then that SunButter should probably be probably labeled contains no milk. I do think it'd be better if there were a standard allergen block that contained an explicit "yes" or "no" for each standard allergen.
- simoncion 2y ago_Maybe_. That'd take up more space on the packaging, and things with small packages may not have enough space to put the whole table. What do you do when the package is too small to contain the whole table? Do you leave things off? Now all of a sudden your standard table isn't so standard. Do you make the table smaller? Make it too small and folks who can't see well are proper fucked. I'm not saying your idea is BAD, but I am saying that it's likely the FDA thought about it and rejected it for not-entirely-unreasonable reasons.
- blueflow 2y agoragebait.
- kristjansson 2y agoYeah, this has been a meme all week. ~one truckload worth of one product has to be recalled and suddenly its 'part of the national conversation'
- elevatedastalt 2y agoI think it's topical because the new administration has been talking a lot about regulatory over-reach. The thought that taxpayer money is being wasted to tell taxpayers that "if they know they have bought butter they must throw said butter because the label doesn't say it _contains milk_" is something that will escape only those people's minds who think everything is fine with the status quo.
- dialup_sounds 2y agoThe FDA didn't order the recall. Costco's supplier did.
- gkoberger 2y agoI get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this. In my 36 years of being alive, I've never once had an allergic reaction in the US due to mislabeling (although I've had them in South America and Asia). Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there's 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans. Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right. If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
- dwallin 2y agoThis almost reads as satire, but I assume it’s low quality ai or just auto-generated content sourced from an FDA recall.
- nerdile 2y agoEqually disappointing: the situation being described, the quality of TFA.
- megaman821 2y agoThe recommendation to throw it out is crazy though. Couldn't they just offer exchanges for any households with a lactose intolerant person that rely on correct labeling.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoI do want to point out that this is not about lactose intolerance. This is about a milk allergy. Different things. Upset tummy vs anaphylaxis. But the recommendation to throw it out is insane. There's nothing wrong with it besides the label. And what person who can't eat dairy is running around buying butter?
- superfish 2y agoButter is actually quite low in lactose content (like 9x less than milk) and the serving size is relatively small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#:~:text=Typical%20lactose%20levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#:~:text=Ty... So generally butter is not a problem for people with lactose intolerance anyway.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoI guess people who bought it and can't use it could exchange it, and you have to throw that out because it lost the chain of cold, but the ones in the shelves? Simply putting a [CONTAINS MILK] sticker on each package should be less wasteful, but the ways of retail might have mysteries I ignore.
- dialup_sounds 2y agoImagine the labor required to individually sticker 47000 individual boxes of butter (approximately an entire 53' trailer) vs. just setting it aside for your regular food waste recycler to pick up. That's the equation they'd be looking at.
- labster 2y agoDevices to add stickers to packages was a solved problem before food allergy warning labels existed. In the 1980s supermarkets made money adding price stickers to every item of inventory, then changing the prices for sales. Meanwhile the food waste recycler (may not exist in your area, some exclusions apply) needs to remove all of the foil wrappers to the butter before recycling. There’s a clear winner, unless you’re trying to send some kind of message to the supplier.
- nerdile 2y agoThis article must have been written by AI. I suppose it's my fault for clicking through a Forbes link.
- elliottkember 2y agoIt seems obvious to me that this was written by Costco’s PR team, doing damage control
- andrewstuart 2y agoMacDonalds Hot Apple Pie! "Caution, contents are hot" Butter! "Caution contains milk"
- elevatedastalt 2y agoThe only reason people think "butter" may not contain milk is because we let advertizers abuse that term to refer to anything vaguely resembling that texture.
- pacificmint 2y agoOf course milk doesn't mean milk anymore either, now that we got oat, almond and soy milk. Along with less common alternatives like coconut, hemp, rice, cashew and macadamia milk. The dairy industry is actually pretty annoyed with that and tries to get the rules changed so those beverages can not be called milk.
- kevinpet 2y agoBy "anymore" do you mean for the past 600 years? Because almond milk goes back about as far as we have cookbooks that might mention it in english.
- tbrownaw 2y agoAnd don't forget glacial milk: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-abstract/74/1/61/5516/Glacial-Milks-and-Their-Laboratory-Simulated https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-abs...
- aatharuv 2y agoThe real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels. If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.
- snvzz 2y agoCould just be "stick this label". Throwing out the food is insane, so is trying to justify such a thing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- akira2501 2y ago> FDA is recommending throwing out the butter It's a recall. You want to avoid any further confusion. You go with the simplest instructions possible. Just because they recommend you throw it away doesn't mean you actually _have_ to. > "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" What value does returned butter have? It's not something we can refurbish. It would be ultimately be thrown away anyways.
- stainablesteel 2y ago> You go with the simplest instructions possible I think this kind of messaging is on the way out. Direct communication is possible, and more than ultra simple details can be conveyed. For the same reason that some people know to avoid certain allergens, others can decide for themselves if they need to.
- pitched 2y agoWhat are the penalties imposed on a customer who does not throw out their recalled butter? As far as I know, there are none? So with the current messaging, anyone willing to take on this risk by keeping their butter can keep it. People who don’t see that option might not be able to perfectly understand the risk. So, this messaging feels perfectly reasonable to me.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- geor9e 2y agoIs this the Tesla sense of the word recall? Do they just slap a "CONTAINS: MILK" sticker on each and consider it successfully recalled? And of course, refund any customer who brings it back, but they do that for any reason already.
- throwawayUS9 2y agoA couple of the HN comments in this thread said, "America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense." "I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this." In my 40+ years of life in India, and among the many people that I've seen or interacted with in 5 Indian states (among 28 States), I've rarely heard someone say they have allergies the way they have in the US. In US, people have allergies to almost everything. In my 40+ years of life in India, and based on the various supermarkets that I've visited across 4 heavily crowded metro cities, I've rarely seen "Allergy" medicines/prescriptions occupy the shelf like they do in the US. Also in the same period of my existence in this third world country, I've rarely seen people concerned about the ingredients in a restaurant menu or labels printed on food packets or containers that there are allergy causing ingredients in there. Like George Bush once cruelly remarked, "India is the cause of shortage of food in the world", because we eat everything, and rarely check the labels or need them, or less allergic to any food. We are just short of food.
- browningstreet 2y agoI went to Europe from the US and all my stomach issues disappeared. When I told my doctor she said, “Move to Europe”. My sister, who lives in AZ, gets boils when she eats gluten. She went to Europe last month, freely ate everything, had zero outbreaks. Got an outbreak on her return flight. I can’t scientifically identify the mechanism here, but I believe it’s real. Our food system in the US is a problem. Things that don’t work here work elsewhere. I’m literally planning a move because of stomach discomfort.
- hollerith 2y agoI've heard several similar reports, one from a medical doctor. (They cannot identify the mechanism either.)
- ashildr 2y agoWhat is the average life expectancy in India compared to the US?
- rcdemski 2y agoI’m more curious about what change was introduced that omitted the label from a small number of packages.
- nimbius 2y ago"Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?" yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me...
- bogantech 2y agoIf you were deathly allergic to milk you'd probably know that butter is a milk product
- TaurenHunter 2y agoThe article seems to be only justifying the waste without going near the well-established fact that butter is made of milk. If you have allergy you're supposed to know butter is made of milk, or no? What am I missing?
- peddamat 2y agoSo many "broken windows" theory believers suddenly promoting broken windows.
- tlogan 2y agoThis is exactly why Trump won. We’ve lost touch with common sense: babies can’t have a gender listed on their charts anymore (causing confusion for doctors and nurses), but butter needs a warning label to say it contains milk. And yet, everyone tells me this is perfectly normal.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoA lot of the comments here, and the article itself, are missing an important detail. The name of the product is "Kirkland Signature Sweet Cream Butter". The ingredient list on the package lists cream, it just doesn't have the required language "contains milk". Are there actual humans that are so deathly allergic to milk but somehow don't know what cream is? E.g. there is a comment in this thread that states: >"Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?" > yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me... I mean, imagine if someone had an allergy so allergic to milk it could "fucking kill them", are they somehow loading up on "Sweet Creamy Butter" and are then shocked that it contains milk?? I get why, bureaucratically, you want to have hard lines, so I understand the recall. I just think this article and some comments that there is actual potential danger in this case are laughably ridiculous.
- spondyl 2y agoShout outs to Henry Waxman who originally introduced H.R.3562 aka the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990. It's wild to think that the mandating of nutrition labels is only 34 years old. I can recommend his biography The Waxman Report which talks about this and other types of legislation that are taken for granted in daily life.
- anon373839 2y agoThe article’s tone is absolutely laughable: > If you have one of the recalled batches, the FDA advises not to eat it under any circumstances. Instead, throw it out to avoid any health risks. Was this AI generated?
- nikolay 2y agoIdiocracy is already here - no wonder! People are so dumb knowing where butter comes from! Next thing - a label on the water warning "Beware - liquid! Wet! Easy to spill! Do not consume nearby electric devices! Do not consume more than 4 gallons a day! Fat-free! No sugar added! Low calories! Non-GMO. Cruelty Free! No animal testing! Compostable! Recyclable! RDI = 2 liters."