Recalls reached their largest scale in years in 2025, while regulators keep moving their deadlines. A company that prepares for the deadline will pass the audit, but may not be ready for the recall. The companies that come through best can say, within hours, exactly what is affected and what is not.
It usually starts with a phone call. A lab result is out of range, a supplier flags an ingredient lot, or a customer finds something in a pack. Before anyone talks about root cause, the leadership team needs one answer: which products, which lots, which pallets, which customers?
How quickly and how precisely you can answer decides most of what happens next. A precise answer means you recall one batch from three customers. A vague one means you recall a month of production from every shelf, just to be safe.
That answer is not produced during the crisis. It is produced, or not, weeks earlier, in thousands of ordinary transactions: a receipt at the dock, a quality hold, a machine alarm, a pallet built and shipped.
Sedgwick's recall index counted 3,295 US recalls across all sectors in 2025, covering close to 858 million units. Affected units rose 26% over 2024, and food recalls under the FDA reached a nine-year high.
The real change is scale. Each recall now tends to touch more product, more customers and more markets. That follows from how supply chains work today: shared ingredients, contract manufacturing, mixed pallets and several tiers of distribution. One bad input can reach dozens of finished products.
Cost follows scale. An industry study led by the Grocery Manufacturers Association put the average direct cost of a food recall at about $10 million, with nearly a quarter above $30 million. That is before lost sales and brand damage, which can last for years after the product is off the shelf.
Regulation is clearly heading towards traceability, but the dates keep moving:
A leadership team that plans around these dates will keep postponing. But recalls do not wait for deadlines, and large buyers are not waiting either. Many already write traceability requirements into supplier contracts, ahead of the law.
The 24-hour rule is still a useful benchmark. If a regulator can ask for your records within a day, your biggest customer will expect the same. Compliance gives you a file you can hand over. The business needs a trace it can act on.
In a well-known pilot, Walmart cut the time to trace a pack of sliced mangoes back to its farm from almost seven days to 2.2 seconds. That proved fast tracing is possible. It did not make speed the whole answer.
A fast answer that is incomplete is dangerous. If it is too narrow, unsafe product stays on the shelf. If it is too wide, you destroy good stock and alarm customers who were never at risk. The value lies in a trace that is fast, complete and precise enough to act on.
That precision depends on three things:
The third is where most traceability tools fall short. They sit beside the ERP and are fed after the fact. They can tell you where product went, but not what happened to it along the way.
We tested this on a scenario modelled on a biscuit manufacturer in North Africa, running warehouse, maintenance, quality and traceability on PIPRA, with Nija as the traceability layer. Two things go wrong in the same week.
First, an oven drifts. A temperature sensor in one zone of the tunnel oven moves out of range. Maintenance gets a work order straight away. At the same moment, the packing exit puts a hold on everything that came off the line during the drift. That product never leaves the plant, so it never becomes part of a recall.
Then, a supplier flags an ingredient lot. A lot of hazelnut paste fails a test after it has already been used. A forward trace from that lot shows which finished batches used it, which pallets carry them, which warehouses hold them and which customers received them. The recall covers those batches and nothing else. Their labels move to quarantine, one pallet is returned from one distributor, the stock is destroyed and a corrective action is opened. A consumer who scans a pack from a recalled batch is told it has been recalled.
No one rebuilt the trail from spreadsheets or emails, because it already existed. Warehouse, maintenance and quality all record into one event history as the work happens. Each entry is chained to the one before it, so the record cannot be quietly changed afterwards.
If any answer is "we're not sure", the size of your next recall is being decided by chance.
No manufacturer can promise zero recalls. Every manufacturer can decide how ready it will be when one comes. That decision isn't made in the crisis room. It is made now, in how the plant, the warehouse and the quality team record their everyday work.
Nija is PIPRA's traceability layer. It is built into the same platform that runs warehousing, maintenance and quality, so the trail builds itself as the work is done. Nothing is reconstructed after the fact.
Find out where you stand. We'll run a mock recall on one of your products with your team and time it from first alert to the full customer list.
