Cheese recalls: current notices and how to check your block, bag or wheel

Why cheese gets recalled: one bacterium does most of it

Read a year of cheese recalls and one name repeats: *Listeria monocytogenes*. It is the dominant cause of cheese recalls by a wide margin, and cheese is unusually well suited to it. Listeria grows at refrigerator temperatures, so a contaminated cheese does not stay as contaminated as the day it was packed — it can get worse on your shelf. It also thrives in the cool, damp rooms where cheese is made and aged, and it can persist in a plant for years.

The cheeses that carry the most risk share two traits in FDA and CDC guidance:

• Soft cheeses, especially fresh, Mexican-style cheeses — queso fresco, queso blanco, requesón. FDA warns these can carry Listeria even when made with pasteurized milk, because contamination can happen after pasteurization, in the plant or the store.
• Cheeses made with raw (unpasteurized) milk, covered in their own section below. Raw milk skips the kill step entirely, so Listeria shares the stage there with E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter.

Who gets hurt matters as much as which cheese. CDC estimates about 1,600 people a year in the United States get sick from Listeria; most healthy adults shrug it off, but invasive listeriosis puts most of its victims in the hospital, and CDC says roughly one in five die. The people at real risk are pregnant women and their newborns, adults 65 and older, and people with weakened immune systems — for pregnant women, CDC and FDA put the risk of listeriosis at about 10 times that of the general population, and the infection can cause miscarriage or stillbirth even when the mother's own symptoms are mild.

Not every cheese recall is Listeria. Undeclared allergens and the occasional piece of foreign material generate recalls too. But if a cheese in your fridge is being pulled, start by assuming it is the bacterium — the food recalls hub carries the live list either way.

How to check your block, bag or wheel

A recall notice identifies cheese by five things: brand, product name, package size, UPC, and lot or date code. Your job is an exact match on all five — the same code-matching discipline our egg recalls guide teaches for cartons. A matching brand alone means nothing; the same company sells dozens of cheeses, and a recall usually covers one plant's output for a few production days.

On a block or wedge: the UPC barcode is printed on the back or underside of the wrapper. The lot code and best-by (or use-by) date are usually stamped in ink on the same panel, sometimes along the seal. Photograph them before you unwrap anything else.

On a bag of shredded or sliced cheese: look for the lot and date printed along the top seal or crimped into the bottom seam, and the UPC on the back. "Best if used by" dates on bags are the dates notices cite most often.

On a wheel, or a piece cut from one: a whole wheel carries its lot on the label affixed to the rind or the box it shipped in. A cut piece from the deli or cheese counter is the hard case — the original codes stay with the wheel, and your wrap gets a store label with a sell-by date instead. If a notice names a wheel you bought a cut from, the store's label date and your purchase date are what you have; call the store or the number in the notice and ask whether their wheel matched. If nobody can confirm, that is your answer — throw it out.

At the deli counter: sliced-to-order cheese may carry only the store's own label. Keep deli purchases in their labeled wrap, and match on the brand name the case displayed plus your purchase dates.

When all five identifiers match, stop there — the next section tells you what to do. If any one of them clearly does not match, your cheese is not in the recall.

Raw-milk cheese, explained

Pasteurization heats milk enough to kill the bacteria that cause listeriosis, salmonellosis and most other milk-borne illness. Raw-milk cheese skips that step, which is why it keeps turning up in outbreak reports — CDC has warned for years that products made with raw milk can carry Listeria, E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter, and CDC's current outbreak list includes a multistate E. coli outbreak tied to raw milk cheese.

Federal law handles raw-milk cheese through a compromise from another era. Milk products shipped across state lines must be pasteurized — with one exception written into FDA's cheese standards (21 CFR Part 133): cheese made from raw milk may be sold if it has been aged at least 60 days at 35°F or warmer, on the theory that acid, salt and time do pasteurization's work. Two things follow from that rule. First, young, fresh raw-milk cheese — a raw-milk queso fresco, a two-week-old raw-milk Brie — cannot legally cross state lines at all. Second, the rule is a legal minimum, not a kill step, and FDA's own work says so:

• A joint FDA and Health Canada risk assessment estimated that a serving of soft-ripened cheese made from raw milk carries roughly 50 to 160 times the listeriosis risk of the same cheese made from pasteurized milk — and that for those cheeses, aging can raise the risk rather than lower it, as the cheese ripens and its acidity falls.
• FDA's own sampling of 1,606 aged raw milk cheeses in 2014–2016 found Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Shiga toxin–producing E. coli in cheeses that had met the 60-day rule.
• CDC's outbreak records include raw-milk soft cheese outbreaks with deaths — the 2016–17 Vulto Creamery outbreak, from a New York creamery's soft raw-milk cheeses, hospitalized all eight people it sickened and killed two.

None of that makes raw-milk cheese contraband; it is a legal, labeled product, and the label must say the cheese was made from unpasteurized milk. The agencies' position is narrower and worth following if it applies to you: if you are pregnant, over 65, or immunocompromised, CDC says do not eat cheese made with raw milk at all — and do not eat soft cheese of any kind unless the label says it was made with pasteurized milk, or you heat it until steaming. Our guide to checking any product you own covers how to act on a notice once you have a match.

If your cheese matches a notice

1. Do not eat it. Not a corner, not cooked into something. Seal it in a bag so nobody else in the house — and no pet — gets to it.
2. Return it or throw it away, as the notice directs. Most cheese notices offer a full refund at the store. Photograph the codes first if you may need them for a refund or a report.
3. Clean the fridge the way FDA prescribes. Listeria survives and spreads in the cold. FDA's guidance after a recalled food: wash the inside walls and shelves of the refrigerator, and any cutting boards, countertops and utensils the cheese touched, with hot water and liquid soap; then sanitize with a solution of one tablespoon of chlorine bleach to one gallon of hot water; air dry, and wash your hands with warm water and soap when you finish. Wipe down unopened packages that sat against the recalled cheese before putting them back.
4. Mind the calendar, not just the fridge. Symptoms can take up to 70 days to appear. If you are in a higher-risk group and ate a recalled cheese, write down what and when; if fever, muscle aches, headache or a stiff neck show up in the following weeks, call your provider promptly and name the food.

Causes, code locations and cleanup steps checked October 22, 2026 against FDA consumer guidance on queso fresco-type cheeses and outbreak food safety, CDC's Listeria prevention pages, and the FDA/Health Canada raw milk cheese risk assessment. The agency notice for your product is always the final word.

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