Health officials have widened a recall of frozen blueberries after an E. coli outbreak grew to include a national retail chain that had not previously been part of the warning. The berries, sold under store brands at two major grocery chains, have been linked to a string of illnesses concentrated in the southeastern United States.
Cases climb to 17 as the recall expands
The CDC has counted 17 people infected with E. coli O145 in connection with the outbreak, including 5 newly confirmed cases, with 6 hospitalizations and no deaths reported. Illnesses have been reported in two states, Florida and Georgia, with the majority of patients located in Florida. On September 2, 2026, the supplier, Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur S.A. of San Carlos, Chile, expanded its recall to cover an additional product: Great Value frozen Organic Triple Berry Blend, sold in 10-ounce bags under lot code 60401-6 with a Best By date of February 9, 2028.
The strain involved, E. coli O145:H28, belongs to a group of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli that can cause severe abdominal cramping, bloody diarrhea, and vomiting, and in more serious cases can lead to hemolytic uremic syndrome, a form of kidney failure that disproportionately affects young children and older adults.
Great Value and GreenWise products both affected
The recall now spans two separate retail brands. Publix pulled GreenWise frozen blueberries and whole mixed berries in eight states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, after its own recall notice in late July. Walmart’s Great Value Organic Triple Berry Blend, added to the recall on September 2, was distributed far more broadly, reaching 16 states across the South, Midwest, and parts of the Great Lakes region, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Both retailers source frozen berries from a range of suppliers, and the fact that a single Chilean grower has now triggered recalls under two different store brands illustrates how far one contaminated shipment can travel once it enters the private-label supply chain, where fruit from the same lot can end up packaged and sold under multiple names.
FDA classifies the recall as its most serious tier
The Food and Drug Administration has designated the recall its most serious classification, indicating a reasonable probability that consuming the affected product could cause serious adverse health consequences or death. That classification reflects the nature of the pathogen involved rather than any escalation in the number of illnesses, since Shiga toxin-producing E. coli strains are treated with particular caution by regulators because of their potential to cause kidney damage even in otherwise healthy people.
The FDA’s own outbreak investigation page traces the timeline back to early July, when the initial recall was issued before being expanded twice as additional retail products were connected to the same supplier through laboratory and traceback work.
What shoppers are being told to do
CDC guidance for anyone who may have purchased the affected berries is straightforward: check freezers for the specific brands, lot codes, and best-by dates named in the recall notices, and throw out or return any matching product rather than attempting to cook it to a safe temperature, since frozen fruit is often eaten raw in smoothies or as a topping where thorough cooking is not part of normal preparation. Because E. coli can survive freezing, a product does not become safe simply because it has been stored in a freezer for weeks or months since purchase.
Reporting from Today.com notes that both retailers have removed the affected lots from store shelves and pulled them from e-commerce listings, though officials continue to caution that berries purchased before the recall announcement may still be sitting in home freezers well after the point of sale, which is why the case count has continued to move in small increments even as the supply chain itself has been cleared.
Why imported frozen fruit keeps surfacing in outbreaks
Frozen berries have become a recurring source of foodborne illness investigations in recent years, in part because they are typically eaten without cooking and in part because international supply chains for frozen fruit are harder to inspect at the point of harvest than domestic ones. Berries grown in South America are often flash-frozen shortly after picking and shipped in bulk to processors, who then repackage the fruit under whatever retail brands have placed orders for that particular shipment, a system that can spread contamination from a single farm or packing facility across several store-brand labels at once.
Investigators typically identify the source of these outbreaks through a combination of case interviews about what patients ate in the days before falling ill, product testing, and records showing which lots of fruit moved through which distribution centers. That process is part of why the timeline between the first illness and a fully expanded recall notice can stretch across several weeks, even when the underlying contamination happened at a single point far upstream in the supply chain.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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