5 Major Butter Recalls That Swept Across The US

Butter's versatility as an ingredient, topping, and cooking fat makes it an essential part of most kitchens. Its deliciously creamy consistency made "butter" a byword for anything similarly rich and smooth, including texturally similar non-dairy food products like peanut butter. But as with other foods, any sign of industrial contamination is cause for serious concern and potential recalls.

Any type of food recall is a highly disruptive process, but recalls on pantry staples like butter can linger in people's memories. Traditional dairy butter has faced several such recalls, including an ongoing recall of Cabot Creamy butter, a 2022 listeria recall of Wegman's finishing butter, and a 20+-year-old Land O'Lakes recall that covered nearly half of the country.

Other butters have a history of massive recalls, such as a 2012 nut butter recall that expanded to include the manufacturer's entire product line. Ten years later, another peanut butter recall hit not just one leading brand but other companies' products that contained the offending peanut butter.

In April 2025, Agri-Mark Inc, makers of Cabot Creamery's extra creamy sea salted premium butter, announced a voluntary recall of one lot of this butter due to a tested product revealing high levels of coliform bacteria.

The good news is that Agri-Marc intercepted 99.5% of the contaminated product before it reached store shelves, which is likely part of why the FDA assigned this recall Class III status, meaning it is unlikely to cause adverse consequences. Just 17 contaminated retail packages were sold in Vermont, carrying an expiration date of 09/09/25 with the code 072 or 073 and a timestamp range of 22:00-00:30.

In food production, coliform bacteria are known as a hygiene indicator. The bacteria themselves are not necessarily harmful, but their presence does indicate a likely possibility of harmful contamination. Since coliform bacteria are commonly present in human and animal digestive tracts, this includes possible fecal contamination.

In mid-2003, a massive recall hit one of the biggest butter brands on the market. That July, Land O'Lakes issued a voluntary recall of its 1-pound packages of salted stick butter for the potential presence of small metal fragments.

The Class II recall affected more than 126,000 pounds of butter, which was not issued in time to stop the product from spreading to stores and homes in 22 states. Affected states were concentrated on the Great Plains and the eastern side of the Mississippi River. They included states that are home to tens of millions of people, like Texas and Florida.

Unfortunately, the contaminated butter was on the market for nearly two months before action was taken. Though it could have adversely affected millions of people, thankfully, no injuries were reported at the time of the recall.

The grocery store chain Wegmans is no stranger to food recalls, including a 2022 recall of its store-brand lemon dill finishing butter, a softened, spreadable butter flavored with spices and meant to add a final touch to foods before eating.

The source of contamination for this butter recall was not the butter itself but the dried dill added to it. Epicurean Butter, the butter's manufacturer, was alerted to potential listeria monocytogenes contamination by its dill supplier, which itself learned of the issue from another customer's quality testing. Listeria monocytogenes is a microorganism that can cause severe illness and death in the young, elderly, pregnant, and immunocompromised.

The recall covered more than 1,000 tubs of butter sold in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. Thankfully, no injuries were reported at the time of the recall.

Jif is a familiar brand of peanut butter, but this ubiquity came back to bite the J.M. Smucker Company in 2022 when the brand voluntarily recalled its flagship product over a salmonella outbreak. Making matters worse, the contaminated peanut butter was widely used in other companies' products, which had to be recalled as well. Besides jars of Jif, over 20 products were affected.

The massive scale of this recall made it both one of the peanut butter recalls everyone should know about and one of the biggest candy and treat recalls in U.S. history. It hit 17 states across the country, from Texas to Illinois and from Massachusetts to Washington state.

The cause was ultimately discovered to be salmonella-contaminated water present on the roasted peanuts production line of one Kentucky factory. A total of 21 illnesses and four hospitalizations were reported before the outbreak

ended with a stern warning letter from the FDA.

Another mammoth recall rocked the nut butter world in 2012, when both peanut butter and almond butter manufactured by Sunland, Inc. was nationally recalled for salmonella contamination. These contaminated nut butters were sold for nearly five months at a number of large grocery chains and sickened 29 people across 18 states before the culprit was discovered.

Within weeks, the recall expanded to include every item made in Sunland's nut butter production facility from May 2010 to September 2012, along with a few others, for an astounding total of around 300 recalled products. An FDA investigation found the likely culprit in contaminated raw peanuts and other surfaces at a Sunland facility in New Mexico.

At the time of the scandal, Sunland was the world's largest processor of organic peanut butter. However, the FDA shut down the contaminated facility due to the enormous recall. Sunland went bankrupt and offloaded the shuttered facility in a court-approved sale to Golden Boy Foods, a distributor of private label foods.