People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.

Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...

These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.

Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.

It's also attempting to appeal to rampant innumeracy!

I, as someone with an allergy, am grateful for the "faceless" people who show up every day for an unglamorous job and keep me alive.

I would agree with you more if it was not a product where Milk was the only ingredient.

This kind of bureaucratic action lacks common sense and protects no one. That's the kind of bureaucracy we don't need.

Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.

We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.

Products are confusing, we shouldn't expect people to know how today's industrial food process works.

No, this is absurd. We don’t have to destroy products that can otherwise be put to good use. The minuscule number of people who are simultaneously deathly allergic to milk and unaware that cream is milk would be just as well served by a recall that said to destroy the product if you have a milk allergy.

This is a black eye on the FDA, and at a time we can least afford the agency to have one. They should have worked out another solution with Costco.

I don’t get this nonsense where a bunch of people can neither empathize nor understand that people other than themselves exist and should be able to rely on relatively simple packaging, and that the instant you create inane and bizarre carve-outs, you create risk for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

Literally just to save money, ala the Elon/Trump D.O.G.E

This is a "waste" which costs money, which raises their taxes, so it shouldnt exist.

  People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy

So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.

This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.

THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?

It's QA over packaging.

And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".

US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.

That achieves the same result without the destruction of perfectly good food.

I, personally, am sick and tired of people complaining about various government functions without seriously contemplating said functions. Is there a way to ask for an exemption to a food labeling rule to avoid waste? I have no idea. But I can play pretend-management-consultant as well as the next person, and we’re talking about on the order of $200k of merchandise, and relabeling it would involve coordinating sending it back to the factory, applying the fixes (I can basically guarantee that, while the factory can efficiently package butter, it probably lacks the tooling to unpackage the butter), and getting it back to stores in time for the Feb-Mar 2025 best-by date. This is absolutely not worth it. And it’s not even worth the paperwork to as the FDA for some kind of exemption.

What I would do if I worked at Costco is to see if I could legally sell it all in bulk to a very small number of very large buyers, and then offer it to some such buyers at a massive discount. “Hey, want 10k boxes of mislabeled butter? You need to sign some documents promising that you will either use or destroy all of it and not give it to anyone else in its present packaging, but you can have it for $5/box.” Even that might be a tough sell, since buyers on that scale probably don’t want their butter in 8oz sticks…

If this were an order of magnitude larger, maybe it would be worth Costco’s energy to see if they could slap stickers on the outer packaging to solve the problem.

Then maybe it should be Ingredients that is highly regulated as the source of truth? "Contains" is effectively redundant and incomplete.

Take that example and apply it to every single ingredient used in food and cosmetics and supplements. Write that regulation please.

Or we can stick to the one that only deals with like, 5 - 10 things.

I've made mistakes on food that has _just_ "ingredients", missing entries while scanning at the grocery store.

Unfortunately, "contains" isn't required, and its location isn't always obvious. imo it should flatly be always required and always in a standardized layout/location (e.g. in a clear to read box).

Imagine if everyone who has an uncommon allergy wanted to have their allergen listed in "contains" too. You'll just end up with two "ingredients" lists instead. It's insanely stupid and redundant.

Edit: care to give a counterargument?

Just as caches are useful in computing even if they are too small to hold everything so too is a contains section that only lists the top 9 allergens. That covers 90% of food allergies in the US.

Do food products with none of the major allergens need "Contains Nothing" on their packaging?

https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/Food-Labeling-Guide...