Salmonella may be in some packages of Costco pepper. Over the last 24 hours, the company has been calling the 140,000 of its customers who may be affected by the potentially contaminated product, according to NBC News. The company has not issued a recall or posted product safety information on its website.
The product in question is Kirkland Signature Coarse Ground Malabar Black Pepper with a “best before” date of March 2017. During routine testing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discovered a rare strain, Salmonella Duisburg, in some of the samples, according to NBC.
Contaminated spices are an ongoing problem. When the U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA) studied the prevalence of Salmonella in imported spices from samples produced between 2007 and 2009, the agency found about 8.3 percent of the samples contained antibiotic-resistant Salmonella strains. Spices from Mexico and India had the highest percentages of contaminated product with 14 percent and 9 percent respectively.
