Lay's Potato Chip Recall Clocks In At The FDA's Highest Risk Level

Chowhound / Yahoo! ^ | January 28, 2025 | Eloise Rollins-Fife

[ProtectOurFreedom]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated a recall of Lay's potato chips across Oregon and Washington and labeled the affected product with its highest risk level. According to the FDA, the recall was initiated on December 13, 2024, and the risk level was assessed as a "Class I" alert on January 27, 2025. The reason for the recall is the potential undeclared presence of milk, a known allergen, in the affected products.

The voluntary recall was announced by the Frito-Lay company in December. According to the agency's website, the FDA assigns Class I designation to recall situations in which there is "reasonable probability that the use of, or exposure to, a violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death." In this case, anyone with a milk allergy or sensitivity should avoid consuming the affected chips.

Per the FDA's enforcement report, 6,344 bags of Lay's Classic Potato Chips were recalled. Those affected had both a Guaranteed Fresh date of February 11, 2025 and a manufacturing code of either 6462307xx or 6463307xx. In a December 16, 2024 press release, Frito-Lay clarified that no allergic reactions related to the recall had been reported.

[Revel]

What a complete waste for food and the environment. Let people who don’t have dairy allergy’s consume the chips. Don’t just throw them away.

[skr]

How much milk allergen could possibly survive after being fried into a thin potato chip?

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

I had no idea but kind of a hunch about it. Thanks for the information.

[zeestephen]

What percentage of the population has a life threatening milk allergy?

Before 1900, I am thinking Natural Selection did a pretty good job of eliminating that risk factor from the human gene pool.

[blackdog]

If you notice, it’s getting harder and harder to find just plain chips anymore. That’s because of allergen and flavor sequencing on the production schedule. 75% of run capacity favors the flavored chips on the schedule over plain chips.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Yep.

At the potato chip place it is probably unsalted chips first followed by salted and so on down the line.

But they either mixed up the flavoring hoppers or someone was totally illiterate. Maybe both come to think of it.

[gundog]

Could be Deep Staters making the case for their own jobs by Trumping up nothing-burgers.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I've noticed that about chips. The unflavored, old-fashioned "regular" chips are way down on the bottom shelf. I'm not a big fan of flavored chips.

I'm so old I remember that all we had was fried chips and salt. Mom would always buy "Wise" chips in the huge tin can - it must have been 14 inches in diameter and that high (I was little in the mid 50s, so it probably wasn't that big. I think the cans were printed and didn't have the paper wrap like this pic shows. I also vaguely recall the Wise delivery man delivered those cans to your house like the milk man, but I could be wrong on that.

I was 10 when Frito Lay introduced "Fritos." I thought corn chips were awful. Terrible idea.

Lays introduced BBQ flavored chips in 1967 when I was 16. I thought flavored potato chips were awful. Another terrible idea.

Lesson learned -- don't put in charge of marketing!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Before 1900, hardly anybody would eat peanuts, either. Only Georgians, probably.

[Bob434]

LOL!

[blackdog]

Private label food manufacturers manage most production that way. It keeps the costs down by avoiding dedicated production lines, staff, machinery, and maintenance. I used to maintain pouch filling machine lines for oatmeal, hot cocoa, grits, etc.....that ran at 1,100 pouches per minute on radial volumetric fillers. That's 110 cartons a minute. One case every 12 seconds thru the casepacker. One full pallet every three minutes.

Crazy fast. Crazy efficient process control.

Those Smuckers jelly cups, syrup cups, Crystal light cups, and pixie stix you pour into bottled water. All insanely profitable and made at such high speeds you need computer controlled cameras and screens just to see a process played back to you at slow enough speed, so you can make adjustments without blowing the machines up in a crashing train wreck.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“Could be Deep Staters making the case for their own jobs by Trumping up nothing-burgers.”

That’s my thought, too.

“Look! DOGE cannot get rid of us! Our jobs are indispensable! Without us, somebody, somewhere could eat a milk-tainted potato chip and die! We need a LEVEL ONE ALERT! Must hire ten more people to create a new alert system.”

[blackdog]

The “Charles Chips” man delivered our weekly can of chips, pretzels, and milk out of his truck, left on the front porch. The glass bottled milk went into an insulated cooler box on the porch. Each week you just left the cash inside the milk box. Nobody ever messed with that. (Back in the 60’s & 70’s)

[blackdog]

I remember “Pringles” by Proctor & Gamble, being launched in the early 70’s. Some day I will share the history of that product packaging insanity. Think about it. Wet slurry, shaped, baked, dried, flavored, and then all oriented in the same stack pattern, dropped into a can off of on a paper can winding arbor, vacuum chambered, sealed from the bottom, and then stood upright, and pushed into a case packer, without breaking those chips!!! Later in life I was mentored by the wrench turning guys that figured the whole process out. It was like being part of a NASA moon launch project. And if you know P&G, it was top secret non disclosure kind of a project. All notebooks, records, sketches, notes, had to be turned in at the end of the day, then would be re-issued after you came in the next day.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

My college summer job was being a mechanical engineering intern at Continental Can’s flexible packaging plant in Paoli, PA. The whole process of making custom printed paper and lined paper bags was amazing like that. The enormous rolls of paper, the unwinders, the flying splices when one roll was exhausted and a new roll moved into position! The machines that folded the paper bags which was a one-bag-at-a-time process. Wow. All for something as prosaic as a paper bag.

[blackdog]

Sonoco, or American Can? Getting that glue lap down just right on the paper is a real art form. I moved on to premium bath tissue machines, both in manufacturing and converting those giant rolls into bath tissue. Today's TAD machines run at 4,000 meters a minute. One long parent roll 20' wide, weighing 9,000 pounds, slit in half by water jet splitters, every eight minutes. (2 at a time)

500 pound bales of pulp drop into the hydropulper every few seconds. If you ever need to dispose of a body, a paper mill has about 100 ways to kill you and there would be no trace. Even your bone fragments get re-ground until the fines put you into the paper. The whitening and brightener bleach your blood n guts into fats scraped off as a foam in the wastewater recirculating process. (It no longer goes out to a river to flow away) The de-wetting water is all recycled. The fresh makeup water merely offsets the Yankee Dryers steam flow in drying the sheet.

[Bigg Red]

I know some people have milk sensitivity, but does anyone become seriously from it?

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“Sonoco, or American Can?”

Continental Can back in ‘70-’72. No idea who acquired it after that.

I worked in the power industry after graduating as an ME in ‘73. Worked in a lot of paper and pulp mills in the PNW, mainly black and red liquor. We’d burn the digested lignins in recovery boiler furnaces. Whatever might of been left of you made steam to power the paper digesting and drying processes.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Dairy was my game for a number of years and the way we could take tankers of raw milk from a slew of farms and turn it into a bunch of standardized products was a marvel to behold.

You can not put a nutrition label on something unless you know exactly what is in it.

Every gallon of milk with the exact amount of butterfat.

Every tub of cottage cheese with the same amount of dressing.

Yeah there were the occasional mistake but considering the amount of stuff we turned out the mistakes were microscopic. And yes, just as Lays did here, we over reacted to all mistakes. No one wants to be the next Bil-Mar Foods.

What I don't understand is how the food got out of the factory with anyone noticing the error.

[DesertRhino]

That is NOT the craziest idea you have there.