Undeclared allergen food recall statistics (1 January 2016 – 31 December 2021)  

• product packed in the wrong packaging
• front of pack dairy free claim instead of a gluten free claim
• incorrect ingredient list.

Accidental cross contamination either of a raw ingredient or during the final production process.

Lack of skills and knowledge to fulfil labelling requirements, for example:

• pasta was declared as an ingredient, but wheat was not
• ingredients were reformulated however labelling did not reflect the new ingredients
• ingredients were not fully-translated into English from the original language.

Supplier verification issues, for example a raw ingredient contained an allergen but this information was not passed on to the manufacturer.

Unknown, for example:

• the food business was not able to determine what caused the issue at the time of recall, or when submitting their post recall report
• the food business did not provide enough information to FSANZ to identify root cause at the time of recall, or in their post recall report. 

The raw numbers for each year are presented in Table 3 and Figure 3, with percentages graphed in Figure 4. Using percentages allows the data to be compared against each year, noting only partial data is available for 2016 due to a mid-year start to collection.  

​Table 3: Root cause for undeclared allergens food recalls mid 2016-2021

Figure 3. Root cause for all undeclared allergen food recalls mid 2016-2020

Figure 4: Root cause percentage for undeclared allergen food recalls by year mid 2016-2021

As shown in Table 3, and Figure 3 and 4, packaging errors are the leading cause of undeclared allergen recalls based on data from post recall reports. The exception to this was in 2016 when the most common cause was unknown, noting that FSANZ only began analysing information to provide root cause statistics mid-year. 

Corrective actions

We collect corrective action information for all food recalls. This information is collected when the recall commences to determine the steps that have or will be taken to prevent the problem from re-occurring. Final information on corrective action is collected in post recall reports. The corrective action data below is from mid-2016 to 2021 to allow comparison with root cause. 

Table 3: Reported corrective actions for undeclared allergen recalls by root cause mid 2016-2021

Note: the percentages are the percent of all post recall reports identifying each corrective action for each root cause. For example: for undeclared allergen recalls where packaging errors were determined to be the root cause, 55% of food business reported altering product labels. 

Figure 5: Reported corrective actions for undeclared allergen recalls mid 2016-2021​​