Protecting families from contaminated food and water
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Protecting families from contaminated food and water
Posted in Our Blog on June 24, 2025
With a recent rise in cucumber-related outbreaks and recalls, consumers may be wondering if their pickles are safe.
I have good news pickle fans!
They are!
Pickles have been popular since the Babylonians! As far as 5000BCE, there is evidence that they had a pickling process that involved date palm vinegar.
Pickles were found in the time of Julius Caesar as well! In fact, Caesar believed that pickles were invigorating, so he requested they be added to the Roman legions’ diet.
Christopher Columbus attempted to stave off scurvy by bringing them along on his voyage. Pickles were aboard the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
Even our very own George Washington was a pickle fiend. Reports indicate that he had a collection of 476 kinds of pickles!
The pickle craving continues on!
Today, each American consumes an average of nine pounds of pickles a year.
That is a lot of cucumbers!
A big problem, when there is an active cucumber-related outbreak and several cucumber recalls.
A Salmonella outbreak linked to cucumbers has sickened at least 45 people across 18 states. There have been 16 reported hospitalizations so far. No deaths have been reported.
States with outbreak patients include Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virgina.
Affected products were grown by Bedner Growers, Inc. in Florida and distributed by Fresh Start Produce Sales, Inc., to retailers, distribution centers, wholesalers, and food service distributors nationwide between April 29, 2025 and May 19, 2025.
Several recalls have been initiated. Some from the original supplier and those who resold them. Other recalls were initiated because recalled cucumbers were used in making the products. Products like sushi, salads, and other prepared foods.
Down south, a producer in Texas has issued a recall for their own cucumbers.
Fuentes Farms issued a recall for a single lot of their Texas-grown cucumbers. In total, 71 boxes sold and distributed between May 31, 2025 and June 3, 2025 were recalled.
These products were primarily sold at Flea Markets in the McAllen and Alamo areas.
This recall was initiated after Salmonella bacteria were detected in finished products of fresh cucumber boxes during U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) routine sampling activities.
Make Food Safe always advises you to stay up to date on food recalls and outbreak news. But there are currently no recalls for pickles, despite a high probability of at least some of these cucumbers being sourced for this purpose.
As it turns out, there could be a reason for that.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) AgResearch Magazine, “by the mid-1990s, there had not been a foodborne-illness outbreak traced to commercial pickle production inf 50 years.” This was assumed that this was due to the efficiency of the basic practices that pickle producers have historically followed.
However, in the late 1990s, certain high acid foods like unpasteurized orange juice and apple cider began making people sick. Even causing deaths.
This was cause for concern for many reasons. Of course for the attributed outbreak investigations. But also for concern over the disruption of common belief that germs like Salmonella and Escherichia coli O157:H7 could survive in these acidic pH levels. The same pH levels that pickles fall into.
The result of that discovery generated additional regulations for the juice industry, and closer scrutiny of the pickle industry.
As a rule of thumb, the FDA regards a 99.999 percent reduction in the bacterial pathogen population sufficient enough to reduce public health risk to negligible levels. Scientists call this a 5 log reduction, and it is the benchmark for food safety.
But can this be achieved without turning pickles into mush?
There are several ways to make pickles.
The most dominant pickle variety at the grocery store is pasteurized pickles.
These shelf stable pickles can be found as dill, bread and butter, sweet, sour, gherkin, kosher, and other fun varieties.
To achieve safe pickle status, this type of pickle takes less than 1.2 minutes when heated to 160° F in a 4.1 pH brine to get that 5 log reduction. Commercial picklers often exceed both, as heating to 165° F for 15 minutes as a standard.
Awesome!
The humble cucumber is the classic pickle. But what about other vegetables. Certain foods like peppers and okra undergo a different pickling process to make them safe and shelf stable.
Pasteurization doesn’t work for these veggies, as the heat would damage them.
Instead, these pickled products combine a high organic acid concentration and low pH brine to kill bacteria. But the pH appeared to be the distinguishing factor when it comes to killing germs like E. coli.
While higher temperatures do the job faster, adding time can do just as well.
At 50° F, pickles at a pH of 3.3 or below require 6 days to reach 5 log reduction. These are what is commonly known as refrigerator pickles.
Shelf stable, unpasteurized pickles with the same pH but at 77° F only needs 2 days to reach 5 log reduction.
What we know of as the iconic sliced dill chips for hamburgers, sold primarily to the restaurant industry in “institutional-sized containers” are handled in the same way as unpasteurized pickles.
Those huge containers would hold onto heat and “cook” pickles to mush by the time the heat could be removed. So they are fermented in a low pH brine to ensure their safety.
We can all come together in pickle-lovers happiness in knowing that pickles are safe!
Whether you can your own, refrigerator pickle them, or get them from your local Farmer’s Market or grocery store, pickles are safe to eat. Assuming of course, the pickle producer follows industry standards.
If you’d like to know more about food safety topics in the news, like “Do We Need to Worry About Pickles Amid These Cucumber-Related Outbreaks?,” check out the Make Food Safe Blog. We regularly update trending topics, foodborne infections in the news, recalls, and more! Stay tuned for quality information to help keep your family safe, while The Lange Law Firm, PLLC strives to Make Food Safe!
By: Heather Van Tassell (contributing writer, non-lawyer)