FDA Produce Inspections Cover Few Foreign Farms

FDA produce inspections have reached only a small fraction of the foreign farms and packing plants that supply most of the fresh produce Americans eat, according to an investigation published October 27, 2026, by The Washington Post. The newspaper combined Food and Drug Administration import records with inspection data and found that, since 2009, the agency has inspected just 7.6 percent of the overseas facilities behind 90 percent of fresh produce shipments into the United States.

The gap is widest in Mexico, the largest single source of imported produce. About 2 percent of Mexican facilities that ship produce to the United States have been inspected in that period, the analysis found. Mexico supplies 96 percent of imported berries, yet the Post counted only 28 inspections of 3,321 major berry suppliers since 2009. Pepper suppliers fared little better, with 57 inspections across 398 major suppliers, while fresh herb suppliers saw 14 inspections across 198 suppliers.

The findings land against a long-standing inspection target that Congress set in food safety legislation signed in 2011. That law aimed for nearly twenty thousand foreign food inspections a year. Last year, the FDA completed 1,024, about five percent of the target, according to the Post analysis. Inspections fell during the pandemic, recovered for a time, and dropped again, with the newspaper's one-year rolling average showing about 84 inspections this June, compared with 103 in June 2024 and 154 in June 2019.

The lettuce outbreak that exposed the gap

The inspection shortfall came into sharp focus this summer, when a cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico sickened nearly thirteen thousand people across 21 states. At least 570 people were hospitalized, and the outbreak was blamed for the deaths of two people in Michigan, according to reporting summarized by the Post. The FDA had last inspected the company's Mexico operations seven years before the outbreak.

Federal investigators later traced the outbreak to farms and a processing facility in central Mexico. In a statement closing its investigation on October 2, 2026, the FDA said a pair of environmental samples collected during onsite inspections in Mexico tested positive for Cyclospora, the parasite that causes cyclosporiasis. The agency said the positive samples, one from a tank holding outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico facility and one from a drainage ditch at a lettuce grower, showed the parasite was present where the lettuce was grown and processed, though investigators could not conclusively determine how contamination occurred.

A separate Salmonella outbreak traced to jalapeño peppers sickened almost 500 people, the Post reported. Federal teams did not inspect the likely source, a grower operating in an area the report described as troubled by cartel-related violence. Inspection records also show that about a third of FDA inspections of foreign firms for foodborne hazards over the past decade found violations, including toilet paper and human feces in growing fields in Mexico and air conditioning units dripping onto crawfish in China.

Why inspections lag and what happens next

The shortfall is not new, and the Post notes that funding for food safety has rarely been a priority for Congress despite that law. Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer group, said the country lacks "a robust system" to verify that foreign producers follow the rules. The Post's reporters, Caitlin Gilbert and Rachel Roubein, with Diana Baptista contributing, combined FDA fresh-produce import data with inspection records to produce the analysis.

The Department of Health and Human Services pushed back on the idea that inspection counts alone measure food safety. In a statement, senior press secretary Emily Hilliard said the FDA is "actively working to expand staffing at foreign posts" and argued that measuring the agency's ability to protect the food supply by a single inspection statistic ignores a broader oversight system that prioritizes resources based on risk. Public health specialists quoted in the coverage agreed that companies bear primary responsibility for day-to-day safety, while still describing the inspection count as an outside check only regulators can provide.

The stakes reach well beyond one outbreak. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, imports supplied 59 percent of the fresh fruit and 35 percent of the fresh vegetables available to Americans in 2023, up from 50 percent and 20 percent in 2007. Mexico alone supplies 51 percent of fresh fruit imports and 69 percent of fresh vegetable imports by value. For shoppers, the practical advice from food safety officials remains unchanged: wash fresh produce, keep it refrigerated, and pay attention to recall notices, since cooking is the surest way to kill the parasites and bacteria that cause foodborne illness.

Sources: Washington Post investigation on foreign produce safety and analysis of the Post's findings.

Related coverage: how early warning systems spot toxic blooms after storms, and what living cells found in human milk reveal.