Perdue Recalls Over 160,000 Pounds of Frozen Chicken, Including Nuggets

Perdue is recalling 167,000 pounds of frozen chicken, including chicken nuggets, over concerns that traces of metal may be in the meat. The recall impacts three separate products produced by the company.

The recall was prompted by “foreign material” detected in a “limited number of consumer packages,” the company said. That foreign material was metal, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) reported.

This recall is listed by FSIS as Class I, meaning that “there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.” 

Ingesting metal wire can cause injury and lead to serious complications like bowel perforation, sepsis, and even death.

The impacted products were produced on March 23, 2024. The recalled products are:

• Perdue Simply Smart Organics Breaded Chicken Breast nuggets in 22-ounce vacuum-sealed plastic packages with a best if used by date of 03/23/25
  
• Perdue Chicken Breast Tenders in a 29-ounce vacuum-sealed plastic package with a best if used by date of 03/23/25
  
• Butcher Box Organic Chicken Breast Nuggets in a 22-ounce vacuum-sealed package with a best if used by date of 03/23/25

All of the impacted products have establishment number P-33944 and were shipped nationwide.

The metal was first detected after Perdue received complaints from consumers who’d found metal wire in the company's chicken products. “There have,” however, “been no reports of illnesses or injuries associated with the product," a Perdue spokesperson told Health.

“We determined the material to be a very thin strand of metal wire that was inadvertently introduced into the manufacturing process,” Jeff Shaw, Perdue’s senior vice president of food safety and quality, said in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to voluntarily recall all of these packages of products.”

If you have any of these chicken products at home, FSIS recommends that you throw them away or return them to where you bought them.

Metal shards in food have prompted several food recalls in the past, Darin Detwiler, PhD, an associate teaching professor of food policy at Northeastern University and author of Food Safety: Past, Present, and Predictions, told Health. As for how metal pieces can end up in food, Detwiler said metal “can break off from machinery” and wind up in products.

In some cases, the metal may only be detected when a customer spots or accidentally swallows it. However, “some companies even have X-rays to look for this,” Detwiler said.

This isn’t the first time chicken nuggets have been involved in a contamination-related recall: In 2023, Tyson Foods recalled nearly 30,000 pounds of dinosaur-shaped nuggets after metal pieces were detected in them. That was also a Class I recall. Perdue also issued a recall in 2017 after blue plastic pieces were found in the brand’s sausages.