Safeway Club Card Members Demand Food Recall Alerts

If you’re a club card member at Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club or ShopRite, you may receive an e-mail or phone call when an item you’ve purchased is subject to a potentially dangerous recall. These are just a few retailers that have voluntarily decided to use contact information shoppers provide to help protect them. But Safeway, the nation’s second-largest grocery chain, does not alert its club card members when they’ve purchased a recalled item, and a class action lawsuit pending in California is hoping to change the supermarket’s ways.

The lawsuit alleges that California law requires companies like Safeway to notify customers about recalls.

While relatively low-risk recalls – such as the one Tyson Foods recently issued after reports that tiny pieces of plastic were found in some of its chicken nuggets – may not matter to some shoppers, the lawsuit in question is demanding warnings for more serious recalls in which products may put customers at risk for salmonella or serious allergic reactions. These recalls, which the FDA classifies as class I recalls, signify that “there is a reasonable probability that use of or exposure to [the] violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

That’s why one the named plaintiffs in the Safeway lawsuit, Jennifer Rosen, was lucky when no one in her family fell sick after eating eggs that were later recalled over concerns of salmonella contamination.

“I get an e-mail about every other day from Safeway announcing promotions and sales,” Rosen told the SF Gate. “They couldn’t give me a heads-up about the eggs?”

Similarly, the other named plaintiff, Dee Hensley-Maclean, alleges that she shopped at Safeway and Costco and purchased snacks that were later found to contain recalled peanut butter. According to the lawsuit, Costco warned Hensley-Maclean about the recall in a letter, but Safeway never contacted her about the same items.

“The main thrust of this isn’t about damages,” one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys told the SF Gate. “It’s about getting Safeway to do the right thing.”

The lawsuit alleges that California law requires companies like Safeway to notify customers about recalls. According to the plaintiffs, Safeway collects shoppers’ information when registering for club cards and keeps track of purchases made when using these cards, making it easy for the company to implement a recall notification system. Furthermore, Safeway would not be responsible for any costs related to the recalls, which are covered by the wholesalers and suppliers that sold the food to the supermarket, the lawsuit claims.

Earlier this month, Safeway attempted to dismiss the class action, arguing that California law does not impose a post-sale duty to warn on grocers; however, the judge overseeing the lawsuit disagreed. He ruled that state law “explicitly or implicitly” recognizes that a company’s duty to warn may be extended beyond sales and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

Although the class action brings some claims against the food store under California laws, it seeks to cover all customers who purchased recalled products from Safeway locations nationwide. That means that, in the future, hundreds of thousands of Safeway shoppers could receive notifications via e-mail, snail mail or telephone about contaminated food they purchased, despite Safeway’s distaste.