Belgian Food Companies Executed 378 Product Recalls and Warnings in 2025

Belgian food companies executed 279 product recalls and 99 warnings during 2025, a total of 378 actions that the AFSCA counted in its annual balance published in March 2026. Chemical risks were the most frequent cause, accounting for 44% of the total —chlorate in soft drinks, mineral oil in fries and marshmallows, and metallic particles in a certain chocolate product, among examples cited—, closely followed by microbiological risks, with 39%, due to bacteria like Listeria, Salmonella or E. coli STEC. The industry itself reported 42% of the cases, while an additional 45% arrived through the European rapid alert RASFF system.

That microbiological risks occupy the second place, just five percentage points below chemical risks, precisely describes the kind of surveillance a mature food industry needs to maintain in parallel: neither chemical contaminant control nor pathogen monitoring can be treated as mutually exclusive priorities. The proportion of cases detected by the industry itself (42%) versus those notified by RASFF (45%) is equally revealing: nearly half of the country's findings do not originate from companies' internal controls, but from alerts arriving from other member states of the European Union.

For TAAG, that microbiological risk represents 39% of corrective actions in Belgian food industry in a single year confirms that monitoring of Listeria, Salmonella and STEC must be maintained as first-level priority, and that depending on the company detecting the problem —rather than an external alert via RASFF— remains the difference between a finding controlled internally and one arriving first from outside the country.