The parent company of Pillsbury posted a recall notice on its website today (March 12), four days after notifying some grocery chains that certain lots of Pillsbury flour in 5-pound bags might be contaminated with Salmonella bacteria.

Hometown Food Co. Inc. responded to questions from regarding the recall and circumstances related to it late this evening, but left several unanswered. The email response did not include a signature line or any other information to identify who at the company was providing the comments. The email did not reveal what specific distributors and retailers received the recalled flour. The company has not reported how many individual bags of flour are under recall.

“Random testing found traces of salmonella in one bag of Pillsbury 5lb Unbleached flour. Out of precaution, Hometown Food Company issued a national recall of approximately 12,158 cases of Pillsbury 5lb Unbleached flour due to the potential for possible salmonella contamination,” according to the email sent from a general inquiry address at Hometown Food Co.

The message from the company said it notified retailers and distributors about recalled flour “within 24 hours of determining a recall was warranted. . .” adding that it intentionally did not post the recall on its public website until it had notified businesses.

None of Hometown Food’s baking mixes are affected by the recall, according to the company’s statement to Food Safety News, because they “are made at a different facility from our flour.” However, the statement did not answer the question of whether any of the flour produced at the implicated facility was actually used in baking mixes or other productss.

“The flour manufacturing facility has a comprehensive sanitation and monitoring program to ensure integrity of the product during manufacturing. Our facilities are certified annually through a GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) certification body and are in compliance with all FDA Laws and regulations including the Food Safety Modernization Act,” according to the Hometown Food Co. statement.

As with its recall notice, Hometown Food’s statement urged consumers to follow proper food handling practices with flour because it is a raw agricultural product, and therefore carries a risk of foodborne illness.

“The industry has ongoing work to determine a strategy for how they will proceed with non-ready-to-eat products like flour that are known by industry and the FDA to have potential risk when raw and uncooked,” according to the Hometown Food statement. “We would like to remind the public that wheat is an agricultural product and flour is made with wheat that is grown outdoors wher bacteria may be present. Flour should never be eaten raw or in a dough/batter, as we state on our package.”

Questions left unanswered by Hometown Food’s statement include:

Can you provide a list of the retailer chains and other distributors that received the recalled flour? If not, why?

Why didn’t Hometown Food Co. or Pillsbury provide the FDA with the recall notice on March 8?

Why wasn’t the recall notice posted on the Hometown websites as soon as the recall was initiated?

Was any of the recalled flour used in other Hometown or Pillsbury products, including but not limited to baking mixes, etc.?

Did Hometown/Pillsbury provide any flour from the same production run to other trading partners to be used in their products or packaged under their own brands.

What is Hometown/Pillsbury doing in regard to investigating and mitigating the potential contamination (suspended production lines or facility, product/environmental tests, etc.)?

A spokesperson from the Office of Regulatory Affairs at the Food and Drug Administration told Food Safety News on the afternoon of March 12 that the agency had not yet posted the Hometown Food Co. recall notice on its website because the company had not provided “a public recall announcement.” The company’s email statement said its officials had provided FDA with “a letter in reference to the recall.”

On March 8, at least three retail chains, Publix, Winn-Dixie, and Meijer, posted their own recall notices for the iconic baking product. The Pillsbury Co. did not appear to have the recall information on its website as of 5 p.m. EDT today (March 12). The notice on Hometown Food Co. Inc., which bought Pillsbury from the J.M. Smucker Co. in September 2018, is dated March 8 but was not available on the company’s website until today.

“FDA has been in communication with Hometown Food Co. regarding this recall from its initiation on March 8, 2019. Should Hometown Food Co. share a copy of a public recall announcement with FDA, FDA will post it to our website,” a spokesperson for the agency’s Office of Regulatory Affairs told Food Safety News this afternoon.  

None of the individual grocery store chains’ recall notices are available on the FDA website. The agency did not respond to a question about whether any retailers have notified FDA about the flour recall.

In a Tweet earlier today, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, said: “FDA must protect consumers and bring clarity to this situation by immediately posting a recall notice.”