California Company Recalls Avocados From Six States Over Listeria Fears

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The hand-packing process line at the Henry Avocado Corporation in Escondido, Calif. The company is recalling avocados sent to six states over listeria concerns.CreditCreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

By Matt Stevens

March 25, 2019

A California avocado company is voluntarily recalling shipments that were sent to six states after officials said the fruit might be contaminated with a bacterium that can cause health risks.

The recalled California-grown avocados were packed at a facility in California and distributed in that state, Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin, the company, Henry Avocado Corporation, said in a statement on Saturday.

It was not immediately clear how many avocados were affected, but the company said that all shipments from its packing facility were subject to the recall. In an article posted on the company’s website about its move into the facility last year, officials said it would give them the ability to ripen more than two million cartons of avocados each year.

From November 2017 to October 2018, the last period for which data is available, 338 million pounds of California avocados were harvested in the state, according to the California Avocado Commission.

Henry Avocado, based in Escondido, Calif., north of San Diego, said it was issuing the voluntary recall “out of an abundance of caution” because a routine government inspection of its packing facility had turned up positive test results for the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes.

Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said that listeria lives naturally in soil and water and that produce can become contaminated by listeria living in the soil, or when manure is used as a fertilizer.

Listeria monocytogenes can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or older people and others with weakened immune systems, the company said. It can also cause miscarriages and stillbirths among pregnant women. Healthy individuals may suffer from short-term and less severe symptoms such as high fever, severe headache and nausea, the company said.

Still, in its statement on Saturday, the company said there had been no reported illnesses associated with the recall.

“We are voluntarily recalling our products and taking every action possible to ensure the safety of consumers who eat our avocados,” Phil Henry, the president of Henry Avocado, said in a statement. The company is “fully cooperating with federal and state health officials to facilitate an efficient and complete recall of these avocados,” he added.

The affected products are sold in bulk at retail stores, and the company said it was contacting buyers to ensure that the recalled avocados would be immediately removed from store shelves.

Specifically, the company said that both its California-grown conventional and organic avocados had been affected. Consumers can identify the conventional avocados by the “Bravocado” stickers on them, the company said. Henry Avocado’s organic products do not carry the “Bravocado” label on the sticker, the company said; those products are labeled “organic” and include “California” on the sticker.

In its statement, the company urged consumers who have bought the recalled avocados not to eat them and to either discard them or return them for a refund.

The company noted that avocados imported from Mexico and distributed by Henry Avocado were not subject to the recall and could still be consumed.

Christopher Mele contributed reporting.