It’s a tofu fried in chili oil. The heat and oil made ink from the packing film leak through. Presumably adding a cooling step or different packing would solve it.
And it’s 10,000 cases. Sounds like a large number, but in a country of 350,000,000, that’s not that much.
A case of 12 packs of tofu is $60 on the highest end. So this is at most $600,000 worth of tofu.
There is $467,000,000 to $521,000,000 worth of tofu sold in the US every year.
This is a recall of about 1/10th of 1% of the tofu market.
This does happen frequently. Food recalls happen all the time. Under Biden it averaged 135 recalls per month. This term under Trump it’s 126 per month. Under his first term it was 164 per month.
The recalls are NOT the metric to look at though. Recalls are normal. Look at when that recall metric starts to really drop off, because then you know the lack of regulation has taken effect and the companies are no longer letting you know when something has gone wrong.
Recalls are a sign the regulations are working. If recalls go down, there are only two outcomes. Companies are either going above and beyond regulations (LOL) or regulations have relaxed to allow them to not report issues.
Weirdly, the input numbers are way different from what is implied by the screenshot, but your math still very much checks out. In total, 75,250 individual packages of tofu have been recalled, and equivalent varieties of tofu retail for $5.50 per package, which makes roughly $414k (though 30 package cases are presumably less expensive per unit than individual packages, so skew that down a bit), just under a tenth of a percent of the market.
That’s reasonable, and maybe it’s more accurate to the typical size of a case of tofu than I realized.
Reporting 10k 6-unit cases, 500 30-unit cases, and 180 units as 10k+ cases (which news sources are also doing) just seems like it shouldn’t lead to good ballpark estimates though
It’s a tofu fried in chili oil. The heat and oil made ink from the packing film leak through. Presumably adding a cooling step or different packing would solve it.
And it’s 10,000 cases. Sounds like a large number, but in a country of 350,000,000, that’s not that much.
A case of 12 packs of tofu is $60 on the highest end. So this is at most $600,000 worth of tofu.
There is $467,000,000 to $521,000,000 worth of tofu sold in the US every year.
This is a recall of about 1/10th of 1% of the tofu market.
This does happen frequently. Food recalls happen all the time. Under Biden it averaged 135 recalls per month. This term under Trump it’s 126 per month. Under his first term it was 164 per month.
The recalls are NOT the metric to look at though. Recalls are normal. Look at when that recall metric starts to really drop off, because then you know the lack of regulation has taken effect and the companies are no longer letting you know when something has gone wrong.
Recalls are a sign the regulations are working. If recalls go down, there are only two outcomes. Companies are either going above and beyond regulations (LOL) or regulations have relaxed to allow them to not report issues.
More recalls are not an issue. Fewer recalls are.
Weirdly, the input numbers are way different from what is implied by the screenshot, but your math still very much checks out. In total, 75,250 individual packages of tofu have been recalled, and equivalent varieties of tofu retail for $5.50 per package, which makes roughly $414k (though 30 package cases are presumably less expensive per unit than individual packages, so skew that down a bit), just under a tenth of a percent of the market.
Yeah I just did a quick search for how much a case of tofu cost lol. I got $28-60, so went with the high end of that.
That’s reasonable, and maybe it’s more accurate to the typical size of a case of tofu than I realized.
Reporting 10k 6-unit cases, 500 30-unit cases, and 180 units as 10k+ cases (which news sources are also doing) just seems like it shouldn’t lead to good ballpark estimates though
presumably removing the packaging material before you subject any food to heat might help as well.
I think it was just put in heated, which is pretty common for a lot of foods. Really makes you never want a plastic package ever again.
oh. that would make sense.