On September 6, 2026, Made Fresh Salads Inc. of Bay Shore, New York recalled all of its ready-to-eat deli-style salads and all of its cream cheese because of possible Listeria monocytogenes contamination. Not one lot. Not one flavor. Everything the plant makes.
The products went to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and the rest of New York City by direct delivery to retail stores and distributors. They shipped in 30-pound and 5-pound white plastic tubs carrying either a Made Fresh Salads label or a Northside label, and in half-size aluminum pans. Expiration dates run from September 3 through September 18, 2026, printed in the bottom left corner of the label. No illnesses have been reported. Consumers can return product to the place of purchase for a full refund, and the company is taking questions at (718) 765-0082, weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern.
The recalled deli-style salads (all Made Fresh Salads brand)
| 5 lb. black bean & corn salad | 5 lb. tortellini salad |
| 5 lb. bruschetta | 5 lb. tortellini pesto |
| 5 lb. carrot & raisin | 5 lb. balsamic tortellini |
| 5 lb. chickpea salad | 5 lb. rotini shrimp pasta |
| 5 lb. Latin coleslaw | 5 lb. Mediterranean couscous |
| 5 lb. crab salad | 5 lb. chickpea cucumber |
| 5 lb. eggplant caponata | 5 lb. quinoa salad |
| 5 lb. lemon seafood deluxe | 5 lb. spicy 3 bean |
| 5 lb. seafood delight | 5 lb. Mexican quinoa |
| 5 lb. shrimp salad | 5 lb. kale chickpea quinoa |
| 5 lb. crunchy vegetable salad | 5 lb. cranberry farro |
| 5 lb. egg salad | 5 lb. kale edamame quinoa |
| 5 lb. mushroom salad | 5 lb. Mediterranean orzo |
| 5 lb. roasted pepper salad | 5 lb. red quinoa hearts of palm |
| 5 lb. tuna w/scallion | 30 lb. potato salad |
| 5 lb. Mediterranean tuna | 30 lb. macaroni salad |
| 5 lb. pasta penne | 30 lb. coleslaw |
| 5 lb. pasta spinach feta | 7 lb. chocolate pudding (aluminum tray) |
| 5 lb. bowtie pesto | 6 lb. vanilla pudding |
| 5 lb. pasta supreme | 12 pc. potato croquettes (aluminum tray) |
| 5 lb. cranberry feta rigatoni | 12 pc. crabcakes (aluminum tray) |
| 5 lb. sesame noodle |
The recalled cream cheese and spreads
| Brand | Product |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. apple cinnamon cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. bacon scallion cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. blueberry cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. chocolate chip cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. garlic & herb cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. jalapeno cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. jalapeno cheddar cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. lox cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. olive pimento cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. scallion cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. strawberry cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. vegetable cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. walnut cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. whipped cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. tofu spread |
| Made Fresh Salads | 5 lb. tofu vegetable spread |
| Made Fresh Salads | 30 lb. scallion cream cheese |
| Made Fresh Salads | 30 lb. whipped cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. garlic & herb cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. lox cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. scallion cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. strawberry cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. vegetable cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. walnut raisin cream cheese |
| Northside | 5 lb. tofu spread |
Most of the people who ate this never saw a label
One sentence in the recall notice does more work than all the rest: the products may have been repacked by retail locations into deli-style or other retail packaging, and the packaging and coding vary by store.
Read that as a shopper. You bought a half pound of potato salad at a Brooklyn deli counter. It came home in a clear tub with a scale sticker: POTATO SALAD, a weight, a price, a store name. Nothing says Made Fresh Salads. Nothing says Northside. There is no lot code and no manufacturer date to check against the recall. The notice lists 30-pound tubs of potato salad, macaroni salad and coleslaw; nobody buys a 30-pound tub of coleslaw. Those were scooped into hundreds of small containers and sold to people with no way of knowing what they are holding.
That is the hole in bulk deli distribution, and it is not new. Recall effectiveness here depends almost entirely on retailers pulling product and telling their customers. If you bought prepared salads, cream cheese or a spread by weight from a New York City deli in the last two weeks, you cannot rule it out from the container.
This is the third Listeria recall from this plant in eleven months
October 2025. Made Fresh Salads recalled all lots and codes of LoBoy and Made Fresh Salad brand Macaroni Salad and Tuna Deluxe Salad after New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets inspectors sampled the product and the state Food Laboratory found Listeria monocytogenes. Production was suspended. FDA’s enforcement report lists it as recall H-0190-2026, initiated October 15, 2025, Class I — the agency’s most serious category — and now terminated.
February 2026. The company recalled fourteen cream cheese and tofu spread items after its own routine sampling found that a part of the mixer used to make finished product was contaminated with Listeria. It pulled the mixer out of service. FDA classified that recall Class I as well, and has since terminated it.
September 2026. Environmental sampling by FDA and the company found that some areas of the facility itself tested positive. Production and distribution have stopped while the investigation continues.
Read those three together. In February the answer was a mixer part. Seven months later the answer is areas of the plant. When Listeria keeps reappearing in the same building, the usual explanation is not a run of bad luck. It is a resident strain living in a harborage site — a floor drain, a hollow equipment leg, a cracked gasket, a wet seam in a cooler panel. Removing one machine does not remove a harborage site.
The question nobody has answered yet
Every isolate FDA pulled from this plant has a genome. So does every isolate from the state’s 2025 sampling. The first comparison is straightforward and FDA can already do it: if the October 2025, February 2026 and September 2026 isolates are closely related, this has been one strain in one building for a year, and the two earlier recalls did not fix it.
The second comparison matters more to families. Those sequences get run against the clinical isolates in PulseNet, the sequences from people who actually got sick. “No illnesses have been reported to date” means no one has connected an illness yet. Listeria can take as long as 70 days to make a person sick; listeriosis is diagnosed only when a doctor thinks to order a blood or spinal fluid culture; and a case in Queens in July does not announce itself as a deli salad case. If a match turns up, this stops being a recall and becomes an outbreak.
What Listeria does
Listeria monocytogenes grows at refrigerator temperature, which is why refrigerated ready-to-eat foods with no kill step after packaging are its favorite home. Contaminated food looks, smells and tastes normal. Healthy adults may get high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea. In older adults, newborns and people with weakened immune systems, the infection moves into the bloodstream and the central nervous system. In pregnancy, a mother may feel like she has the flu while the infection causes miscarriage, stillbirth or a critically ill newborn.
If you ate any of these products and get sick over the next ten weeks, see a doctor and say the words “possible Listeria exposure.” That sentence is what gets the culture ordered.
What to do now
- Return any recalled product to the place of purchase for a full refund.
- If you bought prepared salads, cream cheese or a spread by weight from a New York City deli recently, ask the store whether Made Fresh Salads or Northside supplied it. If they cannot tell you, discard it.
- Clean the refrigerator shelves, drawers and containers the product touched. Listeria spreads to other food.
- If you are pregnant, over 65 or immunocompromised and you have a fever, call your doctor now.
I have spent more than thirty years on Listeria cases — the 33 families who lost someone in the 2011 Jensen Farms cantaloupe outbreak, and outbreaks tied to deli meats, leafy greens, celery and ice cream. What those plants had in common is that the organism had been living in the building for a while before anyone died. Made Fresh Salads has now been told three times in eleven months that Listeria is living in its building. Recalling everything is the right call. Finding the harborage site and destroying it is the only thing that ends this.