Most American consumers assume that the food they eat is safe for consumption. It is reasonable to expect that federal institutions like USDA and the FDA—agencies responsible for food safety and public health— protect the public. In some cases, this is true. However, when it comes to some foodborne, factory-farm-originated illnesses like salmonella poisoning—a foodborne illness that causes 1.28 million infections per year—the reality is far more complicated.
USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is the agency tasked with overseeing salmonella contamination in food. Although the agency sets performance standards for salmonella contamination in the poultry industry, it does not enforce its own standards. The result is that 25 percent of certain chicken and turkey products are allowed to be contaminated with high levels of salmonella that exceed the allowable standards.
Top poultry companies like Perdue, Foster Farms, Butterball, Cargill, and Lincoln Premium Poultry (supplier of chicken to Costco) have failed to meet salmonella performance standards year after year and continue to sell contaminated poultry to the public. The industry operates with impunity, profiting from the sale of products that put the public at risk. How is this failure of government regulation possible?
FSIS has maintained salmonella performance standards for the poultry industry for three decades. These performance standards follow a three-category rating system, with Category 3 representing the worst level of contamination. Poultry slaughterhouses and processing plants are inspected by the agency and assigned a category rating for each type of poultry product. The agency then posts monthly results of each company’s inspection. Although this gives the appearance of USDA taking measures to protect the public, this is far from reality.
While USDA does conduct inspections, the agency does not have the authority to enforce its own standards. It does not have the power to order shutdowns of contaminated plants, prevent contaminated products from being sold to consumers, order product recalls, or issue penalties to companies with egregious levels of salmonella contamination. Poultry companies can take voluntary measures to control salmonella (e.g., cleaning up contaminated plants, issuing their own recalls), but without an incentive to do so or consequences for selling contaminated meat, the problem persists. The result: the poultry industry continues to profit from selling contaminated poultry and endangers public health while doing so.
In the void left by the federal government’s failure to regulate a contaminated industry, the burden of food safety shifts to consumers to protect their own health. Consumers are advised to limit salmonella exposure by washing their hands, sanitizing surfaces, separating poultry from other food, and cooking poultry to a specific temperature. These are all good practices for food handling, but they do nothing to address the problem of contaminated poultry entering the food supply in the first place.
For consumers to know whether the products they are buying came from contaminated plants, they would need to understand and navigate a complex system of salmonella standards and reporting. Although inspection reports for plants are posted publicly, accessing and making sense of these reports is difficult. First, consumers would have to know that the USDA salmonella verification program exists and that reports are available to view online. Second, they would have to understand how to interpret these results. Third, if they did access the reports, they would have to do the onerous work of connecting contaminated plants with the brand names they see in supermarkets.
Shoppers cannot reasonably be expected to achieve 100 percent food safety if no industry or agency is held responsible for preventing them from routinely bringing salmonella home with their groceries. It is the job of the industries producing this food and the federal government to hold companies accountable for selling food that is free from contamination.
The USDA knows it has a problem in overseeing salmonella contamination. In an effort to address serious gaps in government oversight of salmonella contamination, in August 2024, FSIS proposed a significant step forward: a new Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry that would have allowed USDA to classify salmonella at certain levels as an “adulterant” in poultry. This designation would give the agency the authority to recall, condemn, or stop the sale of poultry products contaminated with salmonella above certain levels, effectively prohibiting the sale of many salmonella-contaminated products. However, in April 2025, that proposed rule was withdrawn without explanation, leaving longstanding gaps in effective salmonella control unaddressed and rendering an overall reduction of salmonella contamination extremely unlikely.
Republishing the 2024 proposed rule and declaring salmonella above certain levels an adulterant is an urgently needed and straightforward step forward in protecting the public from the health risks of salmonella. With the right political will, this could swiftly and effectively empower the USDA to reduce contamination in America’s poultry supply. Farm Forward urges lawmakers to prioritize republishing the 2024 proposed rule, and we urge the public to call for greater government accountability in salmonella regulation.
On a more systemic level, we must transform the way we raise and slaughter animals for food. The conditions of factory farming—high-density housing, overcrowding, poor ventilation, and immunocompromised animals—create the perfect breeding ground for bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses like salmonella. Shifts toward plant-based and plant-forward diets can help, but since many people will continue to eat poultry for the foreseeable future, addressing the problem of salmonella and other foodborne illnesses in poultry will require the industrial animal sector to raise healthier animals and slaughter them in safer, more humane conditions.
Salmonella contamination in poultry is not an inevitability—it’s the result of deliberate policy failure and the unchecked practices of industrial animal agriculture. Preventable illness and death from salmonella contamination in poultry will persist as long as factory farms continue to raise animals in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions and the government refuses to hold them accountable. Protecting public health requires policy reform to clean up the poultry industry—reforms that are easily achievable with the right political and public will. Consumers have the power to demand that the industry and federal government ensure that the food we eat is safe and free from contamination. Being educated about the current regulations and state of the industry empowers consumers to make these demands.