Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios cereals produced at General Mills’ other facilities, or on dates other than those noted at the Lodi, California facility, are not impacted.
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General Mills has withdrawed one-.8m packing containers of mislabeled Cheerios, which actually had unfairly been accompanied as flourless.
JPMorgan Chase analyst Ken Goldman said the recall affects about 1 percent of the Cheerios the company makes in a year, and it might make customers leery of trusting that the new Cheerios are really gluten-free.
If you purchased a box of Cheerios or Honey Nut Cheerios labeled “gluten free” recently, you may want to double check the expiration date to see if it is part of a nationwide voluntary recall. However, for a product to be labeled as gluten-free, it must contain no more than 20 ppm of gluten. “We’ll also continue to test products and our oat flour supply extensively to ensure our products meet the gluten-free standard”.
“The recall was unfortunate and will ultimately prove to be a learning experience for General Mills”. In an isolated incident involving purely human error, wheat flour was inadvertently introduced into our gluten-free oat flour system at Lodi.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released an email which stated it had received 125 reports since mid-September of consumers who had encountered adverse effects after eating Cheerios labeled gluten-free. “But General Mills has already made considerable inroads in the gluten-free market and will undoubtedly continue to thrive and find success providing consumers with gluten-free alternatives to the brands they know and love”. General Mills says it is not recalling cereals that were made at other plants or made on different dates.
The introduction of gluten-free Cheerios comes after nearly a decade of planning, with the project beginning in 2007, about the same time that General Mill’s Chex brand moved toward becoming the first mainstream gluten-free cereal.
This will be very helpful for keeping sales moving of the new Cheerios gluten-free rollout, Sprinkle said.
The cereal market has been in the decline for the last few years, but there has been plenty of promise in the gluten-free market.
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A company spokeswoman said General Mills did not yet have a cost estimate for the recall.
