The Dangerous Reason This Store-Brand Marinara Sauce Was Recalled Will Leave You Stunned

Jarred marinara sauce isn't just a grocery store staple — it's also a major time saver when you're craving your favorite pasta dish. While it's definitely a no-fuss ingredient, the process for producing store-bought marinara sauce comes with pitfalls. One of these is the possibility of inedible items accidentally making their way into the mix.

That's precisely what occurred in 2005 when Acme-brand marinara sauce (produced by Albertsons, Inc.) was recalled due to the presence of foreign materials believed to be glass and plastic. Ranking among the biggest marinara sauce recalls in U.S. history, approximately 34,534 pounds of product was recalled and destroyed after the contamination was uncovered.

It's not clear how the foreign objects ended up in the sauce to begin with. In many instances, this common food-safety issue results from problems or malfunctions during manufacturing, which can deposit foreign objects like machinery components and other items into the food being processed. Additionally, it's unclear whether any injuries or adverse effects resulted from the issue. This lack of information might be good news, though, as serious injuries and loss of life would have been covered extensively at the time of the recall.

The notion of finding foreign materials in your food is unsettling, especially when those materials are something potentially injurious like glass. Because there's so little information available on the Acme marinara sauce recall, it's unclear how large the foreign objects actually were. However, the FDA categorized the recall as Class II, which indicates that the product is capable of causing temporary health effects but is unlikely to have serious ramifications. Based on this classification, it's probable that the foreign materials found in the sauce were small.

Ingesting a foreign object can be serious when the item is large enough to cause blockages as it travels through the digestive system. On the other hand, smaller objects, including small glass fragments, often pass through the body without issue. While foreign object contamination is a serious food-safety concern, and while manufacturers must take proper precautions against it, many of the deadliest food recalls in U.S. history involved the presence of bacteria like Listeria (as in the 2024 contamination of Boar's Head deli meats) and Salmonella (which appeared in cantaloupes in 2023).

Also consider that Acme products are still on store shelves under the Signature Select banner. These include varieties of pasta sauce, indicating that consumers still trust the brand even after the 2005 recall.