14 Major Chocolate Recalls We Can't Forget About

Of all the things you buy at the store that bring you happiness, chocolate is probably right up there. So what happens when the world's favorite candy is not only unable to bring you pleasure, but is actively dangerous? Just like any other food, chocolate is a food that can be subject to being recalled for a variety of reasons. Because it's such a popular food, and because its flavor gets into so many different products and items, the scale of these recalls has rivaled some of the biggest candy recalls in history, and has left customers reeling over the danger these unassuming treats have presented.

It's important to remember that most mass-produced chocolate products are pretty heavily processed, and this processing plays a big part in how likely they are to be recalled. With every ingredient added and every step along the production line, the chance of something going wrong gets higher. When it comes to chocolate recalls, certain items have had to be tracked down by companies due to potential contamination by anything from poisonous metals to harmful bacteria. Several chocolate recalls have also occurred due to mislabeling, with some key ingredients (milk, anyone?) being missed off consumer information. If you're eating your favorite chocolate bar, you might wanna put it down as you read through these massive recalls.

Most of us assume that chocolate contains milk — and interestingly enough, that isn't always the case. While white and milk chocolate have milk in them, dark chocolate can often be dairy-free, especially if it's above a certain cocoa percentage. Unfortunately, though, that's not always the case, and mass-produced dark chocolate items may contain milk as a filler or flavoring component. When it does, it obviously needs to declare that it has milk in it on the label, and that's precisely what Hammond's Candies didn't do with its Dark Chocolate Filled Mini Waffles Cones in 2024. The products were found to apparently contain undeclared milk, and this presented a severe allergy risk, prompting a recall after one customer experienced an allergic response to eating them.

The problem for Hammond's Candies was that its products had been shipped far and wide by the time the issue was discovered. Although it was only batches with two use-by codes affected, the products had been shipped to a grand total of 39 different states. Adding to the complication was the fact that this chocolate product had been available online, including on Amazon, meaning that Hammond's Candies had a lot of work to do to get them back.

Foods that are subject to being recalled are generally found and removed from shelves pretty quickly. Every now and again, though, a food that needs recalling will linger in stores and supermarkets for way longer than it should. This was the case back in January 2014, when a recall was issued by Paskesz Candy Company of its Premium Belgian Chocolate Coins. The problem was that the coins could contain milk, but there was apparently no allergen information on the packaging to flag this to the customers. Incredibly, these coins had been on shelves for a grand total of 14 months before anyone had discovered this issue, and this left Paskesz Candy Company having to track down over a year's worth of products.

Naturally, this was probably a huge headache for the company, not least because the knowledge of the product issue had been triggered by an apparent allergic response. It was reported that a child had fallen ill after eating one of the Belgian chocolate coins. Given the serious potential for more allergic reactions, we'd say a recall was very necessary.

Whether you're drinking chocolate milk or putting it in your waffle mix, it's generally pretty low-risk. However, in 2021, your humble carton of chocolate milk may have been riskier than you think, and definitely wouldn't have tasted as good. Hiland Dairy had to recall a massive amount of its Half-Pint 1% Low Fat Chocolate Milk Cartons, after it was found that eight cases of the product had been improperly-filled. Guess what they'd been filled with, too: Food-grade sanitizer. We're willing to bet you wouldn't want a cold glass of that after school.

Although only eight cases of the product had been filled with the wrong liquid, that still amounted to about 400 individual cartons. Plus, Hiland Dairy deemed it necessary to recall a grand total of 4,800 cases, due to them all being shipped under the same product code. As a result, 240,000 cartons had to be tracked down.

Pretty bad, huh? So imagine how Hiland Dairy must have felt when in 2023, the exact same thing happened. The company had to initiate another recall of over 300,000 of its Hiland Fat Free Chocolate Milk, when it was found they might have been filled with sanitizer again. We can't help but feel like it should have figured out how not to do that after the first time.

Mars is a chocolate company whose name evokes intergalactic distances — and the distance that its products travel is pretty extensive. Its chocolate bars are shipped to more than 180 countries around the world, meaning that when things go wrong, it's usually on a truly international scale. One example of this was in 2016, when Mars had to put out a recall for bars of Snickers, Mars, Milky Way, and other chocolates that had been shipped to 55 different countries. It was discovered that the chocolate bars, which were all produced in a Dutch factory, may have pieces of plastic in them, after a customer found a scrap of red plastic in a Snickers he was consuming.

Although Mars pointed out that the plastic may have only been in one bar, it didn't matter: The company was obliged to recall any products that might have been affected out of caution. Countries ranging from the United Kingdom to Sri Lanka and Vietnam were all affected, and what made matters worse was that the products had been sold over a period of almost seven months. The recall put a significant dent in Mars' profits due to the recall process and lost sales.

Eating chocolate can certainly create feelings of euphoria, but there was nothing blissful about this recall. Euphoria Chocolate Company was forced into putting out a recall notice for several of its chocolate truffles, as a knock-on consequence of a much wider recall of peanut butter that was sweeping the nation in 2022. Its Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Meltaways, Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Meltaways, and Peanut Butter Classic Truffles were all made with Jif peanut butter, which had been found to be the suspected cause of a widespread salmonella outbreak that had swept across multiple states, causing over 20 illnesses and four hospitalizations.

Unfortunately for Euphoria Chocolate Company, its affected products had been sold with a range of use-by dates spanning several months, indicating that a lot of its items had to be tracked down. Luckily, though, it didn't seem that its truffles had been the cause of any specific infections. Meanwhile, J.M. Smucker, the company that makes Jif peanut butter, was left with serious damage to its reputation and trust in its products.

You don't have to be a genius to know that people who have nut allergies have to be careful. However, it's not unreasonable for them to expect that chocolate that doesn't include nuts on the label won't actually have them inside. This wasn't the case in 2017, when Aldi had to hurriedly recall some of its chocolate bars after it was found that almond pieces might have snuck into them. Aldi's Choceur Dark Chocolate Bar, which had no mention of almonds, was recalled from stores in 24 different states after the discovery.

Things were made more worrisome by the fact that Aldi had also sold the chocolate bar via Instacart, which meant that the store had to trawl through records of online shoppers and contact affected customers. The issue was only discovered after an Aldi employee found the nuts in the product. It's a good thing they did, too (and that they weren't allergic to nuts themselves), as unintentional consumption of the chocolate could have been incredibly harmful to any customers — and potentially very damaging to Aldi as a company. 

Proper allergen information is essential to keep customers safe, but it's incredible how often one or two allergens are missed from a label. What's less common, but even more baffling (and dangerous), is when every single allergen on a product isn't included. However, this is exactly what happened back in December 2024, when Cal Yee Farms, a California-based company, had to recall a selection of its chocolate-covered products. The reason? Undeclared ... everything.

Yep, that's right, folks. Somehow, Cal Yee Farms had sent out all of its chocolate-covered products (including chocolate-covered almonds, raisins, walnuts, and apricots) without any allergen info whatsoever. This meant that milk, soy, wheat, sesame, almonds, and FD&C Yellow No. 6 (a food coloring which some people have a hypersensitivity to) weren't indicated on the items. This recall was serious enough to be bumped up to a Class I variety shortly after the initial notice was put out, indicating that the products could present a higher risk of causing significant health consequences or even death. When you throw in the fact that its products were distributed to almost 10 different states, this was hardly a minor event.

It's easy not to think twice about the safety of store-bought foods, particularly when they come from companies as big and well-known as Nestlé. Maybe it's just us, but we sorta expect huge companies like this to be using ingredients that bear barely any risk to humans. Unfortunately, in 2009, Nestlé proved us all wrong, with a disastrous recall event that left dozens of people gravely ill. Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough was found to be responsible for a multi-state outbreak of E. coli, which saw 77 people becoming ill over several months. Of those people, 35 were hospitalized, with 10 of them developing hemolytic-uremic syndrome, a condition that produces blood clots around the body which can lead to organ damage.

The culprit in the store-bought cookie dough was likely its flour, given that the other ingredients in the dough had been sanitized. Thankfully, nobody died as a result of eating the chocolate chip cookie dough, but it was a close call. You'd think that Nestlé would have learned its lesson from this event (which saw 3.6 million packages of its cookie dough being recalled), but 14 years later it had to announce another recall of its cookie dough products — this time due to the potential presence of wood fragments in them. Yum!

Let's be real: Of all the things you probably want in your chocolate, lead is gonna be one of the last ones. In 2006, though, that was the very cause of a recall announced by Dagoba Organic Chocolate. The company had to issue a recall for its 87% Dark Chocolate Bar, and a few of its other chocolate products, after routine testing by the company found that they contained high levels of lead. The retailer then had to track down both individually-sold and bulk-buy versions of its products, which had been shipped around the country.

So, how did the lead get into the chocolate in the first place? It might not have been what you think. Our first assumption was that the lead was absorbed by the cacao beans that make the chocolate, but it turns out that in most cases of lead contamination in chocolate, the heavy metal gets into the food after the beans have been harvested. Instead, the lead comes from human contamination, generally as a byproduct of waste or burning of plastic or trash, after which it can drift through the air and stick to the harvested beans.

Chocolate cornflakes are a delicious twist on an easygoing, inoffensive breakfast. Recently, though, these flakes have been a little riskier than you might think to buy and consume. In 2024, Kellanova had to issue a recall notice for boxes of its Kellogg's Corn Flakes Chocolate Flavor sold in retailers in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, it seemed that something went slightly wrong in the production of the cornflakes, and certain boxes contained hard chunks of cereal pieces that didn't soften or separate when milk was added. Kellanova was therefore worried that these cereal pieces could hurt people's teeth, or else be a choking hazard — and as this is a product that clearly appeals to kids, it was right to be concerned.

Thus began the recall process for this corn flake product, and for Kellanova this was a slightly bigger job than it would probably like. The company had to recall boxes of the flakes with best-before dates spreading over almost five months. Additionally, six different supermarket chains had been selling the cornflakes, requiring Kellanova to look pretty far and wide.

When you think of chocolate that appeals to kids, you likely think of Kinder products. Because of this, any issues with them that could cause ill health to your little ones feel particularly worrisome and scary. In 2022, Kinder faced what might have been its biggest challenge yet when a salmonella scare caused a multinational recall of its products. Various businesses that sold the brand in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland all had to put out recall notices of individual products that could have been contaminated with the harmful bacteria.

Naturally, this meant that a huge amount of coordination was required from these companies, not least because each country sells slightly different versions of Kinder products. All of these items were manufactured in the same facility in Belgium, where salmonella had been detected. Sadly, in some cases, the recall was too late to avoid infection: In both Ireland and the United Kingdom, there were reports of individuals contracting salmonella that was linked back to Kinder items.

Dark chocolate products are a go-to candy for people with milk allergies or sensitivities, given that many of them are made without any dairy and are therefore safe to eat. However, if that's the case, you kinda want the companies making these milk-free dark chocolate products to ... not put milk in them. This was apparently too big of a challenge for Meijer, which was forced to recall some of its dark chocolate-covered almond products back in 2023, because they had milk in them that wasn't declared on the label. This was, of course, a huge risk for people consuming them, as they could have triggered a dangerous and potentially fatal allergic response.

The issue stemmed from a supplier that Meijer used, Lamontagne Chocolate Corp., which had switched some of its product specs to include milk. The supplier didn't communicate this change to Meijer, leading it to merrily ship out its dark chocolate-covered almonds with the same packaging. This wasn't just a case of a few products being affected, either: All date codes from the products that had been sold in Meijer stores in six states had to be recalled.

When the risk of salmonella rears its head, food companies have to take immediate, sweeping action to ensure that their products don't infect people — and sometimes that comes at an enormous cost. This was seen in 2024, when Clasen Quality Chocolate had to recall millions of pounds worth of chocolate items because of potential salmonella contamination. The company recalled 10 different products in vastly varying quantities which had been shipped to states across the country. Some items got off lucky, with only 30 pounds of its milk chocolate wafers being affected. Others, like its bulk-sold tankers of milk chocolate flavored coating, were significantly affected: over 2.6 million pounds had to be recalled.

The recall was first posted in early May, but was updated in June to give it a Class II categorization. Despite the scale of the potential problem, it was unclear as to whether anybody actually became sick from eating the items. Clasen Quality Chocolate clearly wasn't going to take that risk, though.

What's more romantic than giving a heart-shaped box of chocolates to someone? Well, if you're giving it to someone who has a nut allergy and there are unexpected tree nuts in them, expect the romance to be sucked out of the room pretty quickly. In 2015, this was a very real possibility, when See's Candies sold its 8-ounce Classic Red Heart with Assorted Chocolates box with individual pieces inside that contained nuts, despite them not being declared on the label. The issue was discovered by chance by a retailer selling the boxes, who noted that improperly-labeled products were dotted amongst properly-labeled ones.

Despite only some items being affected, it seems that See's Candies had to recall pretty much all of them. To make matters worse, the chocolates had been shipped and sold nationwide. The good news was that no illnesses had been reported at the time of recall. Small mercies, huh?