Prod­uct Recalls. Firestone

While John­son & John­son can be excused from per­sonal blame, Fire­stone and Ford bear total respon­si­bil­ity for the car­nage and destruc­tion that led to mas­sive prod­uct recalls of Fire­stone tires in 2000. Upon being informed that sev­eral mod­els of 15? Fire­stone tires on Ford Explor­ers and Mer­cury Moun­taineers had extremely high fail­ure rates, Ford engi­neers evi­dently rec­om­mended sev­eral safety changes and improve­ments that were not imple­mented by either com­pany. All of the alleged prob­lems cen­tered around tread sep­a­ra­tion, whereby the tire’s treads rapidly frayed away lead­ing to the total dis­in­te­gra­tion of the tire – some­times while the car was in motion. Some 200 deaths and 3,000 major injuries resulted from the cat­a­strophic tire fail­ures, which also pre­ceded then Ford CEO Jacques Nasser’s res­ig­na­tion.
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Yo Yo Ball

The Yo Yo Ball, a once-popular kids toy, had to be recalled in 2003 fol­low­ing what Yahoo Canada calls “at least 410 reports of near-strangulation of young chil­dren.” The toy’s stretchy cord proved exces­sively dan­ger­ous to younger chil­dren who unknow­ingly wrapped it around their throats, and Con­sumer Reports notes at least 16 com­plaints of kids los­ing con­scious­ness as a result of Yo Yo Ball-induced acci­dents. When a lit­tle girl stran­gled her­self dur­ing a Yo Yo ball trick known as “The Heli­copter” (swing­ing the ball over one’s head), gov­ern­ments had seen enough. The preva­lence of such prob­lems led coun­tries like Canada and the UK to insti­tute out­right bans of the Yo Yo Ball in 2003, which has plum­meted in pop­u­lar­ity ever since. Canada’s health depart­ment in par­tic­u­lar recalled over 2,000 of the toys before its ban went into effect.
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Dell prod­uct recalls.
Note­book Batteries

Giz­modo was on to some­thing when it reported on a Dell lap­top burst­ing into flames at a tech­ni­cal con­fer­ence in Japan in June, 2006. What must have seemed at the time like a freak occur­rence turned out to be a sys­temic flaw with over four mil­lion Dell note­book bat­ter­ies pro­duced by Sony. The lithium ion bat­ter­ies were prone to exces­sive over­heat­ing, pos­ing a fire haz­ard that at least six peo­ple reported before Sony man­dated a world­wide prod­uct recalls of the defec­tive bat­ter­ies, which were used in Dell’s Lat­i­tude, Insp­iron, Pre­ci­sion and XPS mod­els. To its credit, Dell exchanged the haz­ardous bat­ter­ies with new ones, often sup­ply­ing con­sumers with brand new machines in its place.
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Worces­ter­shire Sauce Prod­uct Recalls

Many of us enjoy adding a lit­tle spice to our meals, but UK res­i­dents took a lot of risk in doing so between 2005–2007. A lengthy inves­ti­ga­tion found that a Worces­ter­shire sauce man­u­fac­tured Pre­mier Foods had been con­t­a­m­i­nated with a car­cino­genic dye known as Sudan 1. The con­t­a­m­i­na­tion was linked back to adul­ter­ated chili pow­der, and the result­ing prod­ucts were used in every­thing from piz­zas to ready-made meals sold on super­mar­ket shelves. Fear of the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and its risks prompted the removal of over 400 sus­pected prod­ucts from shelves. Remark­ing on the finan­cial loss to man­u­fac­tur­ers and retail­ers, FoodNavigator.com con­tends that “the fig­ure is cer­tain to run into dou­ble digit mil­lions.” Inter­est­ingly, the Sun­danese gov­ern­ment has demanded that the deadly dye have its name changed, pre­sum­ably to deflect atten­tion away from where it is pro­duced.
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Cad­bury Prod­uct Recalls
Cadbury-Schweppes

UK based Cadbury-Schweppes was forced to recall over a mil­lion choco­late bars in 2006 after a wide­spread food scare involv­ing Sal­mo­nella poi­son­ing in the UK and Ire­land. Accord­ing to RedOr­bit, the com­pany only recalled the choco­late after months of crit­i­cism of the company’s deci­sion to delay inform­ing author­i­ties about the Sal­mo­nella prob­lem for five months. The biggest scare at the time involved Easter eggs, which may or may not have been con­t­a­m­i­nated before kids got a chance to eat them. While this fear turned out to be pre­ma­ture, the slug­gish pace at which Schweppes responded to the poten­tial prob­lem was trou­bling to say the least.

Peanut But­ter Prod­uct Recalls

One of the most far-reaching food prod­uct recalls in US his­tory came in 2009, when Peanut Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica recalled bulk peanut but­ter prod­ucts for fear of Sal­mo­nella contamination.

In total, the Food & Drug Admin­is­tra­tion even­tu­ally recalled at least 3913 dif­fer­ent prod­ucts from roughly 361 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies com­pa­nies, includ­ing such pop­u­lar snacks as Lit­tle Deb­bie crack­ers. Accord­ing to MSNBC, at least six deaths were blamed on the out­break, along with some 470 peo­ple who became ill in 43 dif­fer­ent states, the most com­mon symp­toms being “diar­rhea, cramp­ing and fever.” Cries for food safety reform were heard far and wide fol­low­ing the recall, and it remains to be seen whether any changes occur.

Pis­ta­chios

Barely two months had passed fol­low­ing the peanut but­ter recall, California-based Set­ton Pis­ta­chio opted to recall its entire 2008 crop of pis­ta­chios due to Sal­mo­nella fears. The com­pany can be cred­ited with get­ting out in front of the issue before it became a major prob­lem, act­ing as soon as it dis­cov­ered “sev­eral types of sal­mo­nella dur­ing rou­tine analy­sis of the prod­uct”, accord­ing to the New York Times. While the infec­tion was said to be unre­lated to the peanut but­ter scare, Setton’s exec­u­tives no doubt real­ized that con­sumers were in no mood to take risks and likely opted to ini­ti­ate the recall as a proac­tive buffer against law­suits and crit­i­cism.

Nes­tle Prod­uct Recalls
Toll House Cookies

Not every food prod­uct recall involves sal­mo­nella. The Nes­tle Toll House cookie recall of 2009, for exam­ple, arose from scares of an E. coli con­t­a­m­i­na­tion that made sev­eral con­sumers ill after eat­ing the dough in its raw, uncooked state. Fears of a more wide­spread con­t­a­m­i­na­tion prompted Nes­tle to recall 300,000 pack­ages of the con­tro­ver­sial cook­ies after the Wall Street Jour­nal revealed a total of 65 reported ill­nesses. At least 25 peo­ple were hos­pi­tal­ized in con­nec­tion with eat­ing the poi­soned cook­ies, “, includ­ing seven with a severe com­pli­ca­tion that can cause kid­ney fail­ure” accord­ing to the Wall Street Journal’s report.

Westland/Hallmark Beef

Food proces­sor Westland/Hallmark was forced in 2008 to recall over 143 mil­lion pounds of beef after the USDA deemed it unfit for human con­sump­tion, accord­ing to Bloomberg. While there were no reported ill­nesses (and it was later con­cluded that no ill­nesses were likely), the beef was nev­er­the­less recalled because cat­tle had failed to be inspected before the result­ing beef was shipped to school cafe­te­rias and super­mar­kets. These prod­uct recalls was a major blow to the com­pany, with as many as 150 school dis­tricts ceas­ing to pur­chase any beef from Hall­mark in what is now acknowl­edged as the largest beef recall in US history.

Choco­late Worms

South Korean and Chi­nese choco­late lovers were in for a rude awak­en­ing when they dis­cov­ered whatLive­Leak terms “lit­tle white worms” inside of designer choco­late in August, 2007. A video at LiveLeak.com shows the worms being found in real choco­lates by sim­ply unwrap­ping them and break­ing the can­dies apart – a nau­se­at­ing sight to say the least. What’s worse, the choco­lates were actu­ally coun­ter­feits of a pop­u­lar brand, and the worms were actu­ally lar­vae of a com­mon moth. Chi­nese busi­nesses feared that the worm scan­dal would lead to more prod­uct recalls and a weak­en­ing of the already ques­tioned “made in China” brand.

Mat­tel Toys Prod­uct Recalls

About 9 mil­lion toys were recalled by Mat­tel in 2007 amidst dan­gers from lead paint and mag­nets, accord­ing to MSNBC. Chinese-made toys (includ­ing such pop­u­lar main­stays as Bar­bie, Polly Pocket and items from the movie “Cars”) were at the cen­ter of the recall, which arose when it was revealed that deadly and ille­gal lead paint had been used. The mag­nets also cre­ated con­tro­versy because of their small size and the ease with which they could be swal­lowed. This recall came just two weeks after an ear­lier one of about 1.5 mil­lion Fisher-Price infant toys, also because of lead paint scares. At least one child died from prob­lems with the toys and 19 oth­ers required surgery after swal­low­ing mag­nets since 2003. Chalk it up to another embar­rass­ing black eye for Chi­nese man­u­fac­tur­ers dur­ing the 2000’s.

arti­cle quoted from Bill­Shrink

Worst prod­uct recalls in his­tory