Undeclared Allergens: What the Loard's Ice Cream Recall Teaches Every Food Business

When Silver Moon LP, doing business as Loard's Ice Cream out of San Leandro, California, issued a voluntary recall covering all of its retail-packaged products, the reason wasn't a contamination event or a processing failure. It was something more preventable: the products shipped without ingredient labeling at all. No allergen declarations. No sulfite disclosures. No added color statements. Just packaging with none of the information that federal law requires to be there.

That gap — between a product leaving the facility and the label doing its job — is exactly where recalls like this are born. And it's exactly the kind of gap that shows up more often than most food business owners want to admit.

The affected products potentially contain undeclared milk, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, soy, and wheat — six of the nine major food allergens recognized under federal law. For someone with a severe allergy or anaphylaxis risk, an unlabeled ice cream product isn't just a regulatory problem. It's a genuine health threat.

Here's what food manufacturers, co-packers, and retailers need to understand about why this happened, what the law requires, and how to make sure you're not the next company issuing one of these alerts.

What Actually Happened with the Loard's Recall

According to the FDA recall notice, Silver Moon LP dba Loard's Ice Cream voluntarily recalled all products sold in retail-sized packaging after it was determined the products were distributed without ingredient labeling. The recall covers undeclared allergens as well as undeclared sulfites and added colors — a combination that suggests labeling was missing entirely, not just incomplete in one area.

The FDA classified this as a Class II recall. That classification means the agency believes there is a remote probability of adverse health consequences, but the potential hazard is real, particularly for individuals with known allergies. When you're dealing with milk, eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts in an ice cream product, "remote probability" still means someone with a severe allergy could have a serious reaction from a product they had every reason to believe was safe to eat.

The voluntary nature of the recall is worth noting. Loard's self-reported and initiated the action rather than waiting for an FDA enforcement decision. That matters — it's the right move, and it's how the regulation is designed to work. But it doesn't change the fact that the products should never have shipped without labels in the first place.

The Regulation Behind the Recall: FALCPA and FASTER Act

Two federal statutes govern this situation, and understanding them is non-negotiable if you're in the food business.

The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA), enacted in 2004, established the original eight major food allergens that must be declared on all packaged food labels sold in the United States: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soybeans. FALCPA requires that these allergens be declared either within the ingredient list using their common name or in a separate "Contains" statement immediately following the ingredient list.

The FASTER Act (Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education, and Research Act), signed into law in April 2021, added sesame as the ninth major food allergen, with mandatory labeling taking effect January 1, 2023. So as of 2023, any food manufacturer distributing packaged retail products in the U.S. is required to declare all nine of these allergens when present.

Beyond allergens specifically, 21 CFR Part 101 governs food labeling broadly and requires a complete ingredient list on any retail food product. Sulfites at 10 ppm or greater and certified color additives must also be declared — which is why the Loard's recall flags those in addition to the allergen violations.

There is no labeling exemption for small manufacturers, artisan producers, or regional brands. The law applies uniformly to any food sold in retail-sized packaging to consumers.

What the Law Actually Requires on a Packaged Food Label

This is worth spelling out plainly, because the Loard's situation wasn't a case of getting one declaration wrong. It was a case of products shipping with no ingredient labeling at all — and that tells me something about how labeling control broke down somewhere in the process.

Under current federal law, every retail packaged food product must include:

When products ship without any of these elements — as appears to be the case here — every single one of those requirements is violated simultaneously. That's not a labeling oversight. That's a labeling system failure.

How This Happens: The Process Gaps That Lead to Unlabeled Product

I've worked with food manufacturers at enough stages of their operations to recognize the scenarios that produce this kind of recall. The most common ones look like this.

New product rollout outpaces label development. A company expands its product line faster than its label approval process can keep up. Retail packaging gets ordered before label copy is finalized, or products start shipping before the packaging supplier delivers the labeled containers.

Bulk and retail packaging get mixed up. Food service and bulk products don't always require the same level of consumer labeling. When a company that normally sells in bulk starts moving into retail-sized units — or vice versa — there's a real risk that unlabeled bulk containers end up in a retail channel.

Label version control breaks down. A product reformulation happens, the label update doesn't follow, and the old labeled packaging (or no labeled packaging) gets used to fill an order.

Co-packing relationships lack label compliance checkpoints. When a brand uses a co-manufacturer or co-packer, the question of who owns label compliance — the brand or the packer — sometimes goes unresolved. Products ship, and nobody audited the label before they left the facility.

In my view, most of these scenarios share a root cause: labeling compliance is treated as a task to complete rather than a control point to manage. That's the mindset shift that prevents recalls.

Practical Compliance Steps for Food Manufacturers Right Now

If you're a food manufacturer, co-packer, or even a retailer with private-label products, here is what I'd recommend reviewing immediately in light of this recall.

Step 1: Map every product to a label version. You should be able to pull up any product in your line and immediately confirm which label version is currently approved, which packaging carries that version, and when it was last reviewed against your current formula. If you can't do that in under five minutes, your label control system has a gap.

Step 2: Confirm all nine allergens are declared. With sesame mandatory as of January 1, 2023, a lot of companies updated their labels for the big eight but missed sesame or didn't assess it properly. Walk your ingredient deck and verify that every allergen present — including through cross-contact risk — has been evaluated and, where required, declared.

Step 3: Audit your sulfite and color declarations. These two categories get less attention than allergens but are required and are part of the Loard's recall specifically. Review your formulas for sulfite-containing ingredients (wine, dried fruit, certain preservatives) and any certified color additives.

Step 4: Establish a "label verification" hold step. Before any batch ships, someone with label authority should verify that the packaging applied to that batch matches the current approved label for that product. This is a simple pre-shipment check that costs almost nothing and prevents a great deal of pain downstream.

Step 5: Review your recall readiness. The Loard's situation resulted in a voluntary recall, which means Loard's had to execute a recall response — customer notifications, distribution tracing, FDA coordination. Do you have a written recall plan? Do you know your distribution chain well enough to reach all customers with affected product? If the answer is uncertain, now is the time to build that capability, not during an actual recall event.

The Sesame Update: A Compliance Deadline Many Companies Missed

I want to linger on sesame for a moment because it's the most recent change to the federal allergen labeling framework, and in my experience working with food companies, it's still causing confusion.

The FASTER Act added sesame as a major allergen with a mandatory compliance date of January 1, 2023. This means any packaged food sold at retail in the U.S. after that date must declare sesame when it is present as an intentional ingredient.

The tricky part is that sesame often hides under ingredient names that consumers — and even food company employees — don't immediately recognize: tahini, til, gingelly, benne, and various flavoring or oil derivatives. A thorough FASTER Act compliance review requires going ingredient by ingredient and asking your suppliers for documentation.

According to FDA estimates, sesame affects approximately 1.6 million Americans, and it is now one of the leading causes of food allergy-related emergency department visits. Missing that declaration isn't a minor technical error.

What a Class II Recall Means for Your Business

The FDA's recall classification system is worth understanding clearly because it shapes both the regulatory response and the public communication requirements.

• Class I: Reasonable probability that use of the product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.
• Class II: Remote probability of adverse health consequences, or where the consequences are temporary and medically reversible.
• Class III: Use of the product is not likely to cause any adverse health consequence.

The Loard's recall is Class II. That means FDA is watching, the recall is public record, and the company is required to conduct effectiveness checks to confirm that the recalled product has actually been removed from commerce. It doesn't mean the company avoids scrutiny — Class II recalls appear on the FDA's public database and can surface in due-diligence reviews, retail buyer evaluations, and insurance assessments.

For a small regional brand, even a Class II recall can have lasting commercial consequences. Retail buyers pull products. Distribution relationships get reviewed. Consumer trust, once broken on a food safety issue, is slow to rebuild.

The Broader Lesson: Labeling Is a Food Safety Control

There's a framing problem I see in how many food companies think about labeling. It gets treated as a marketing and regulatory compliance function — something that lives in the design department or with the regulatory affairs team. Food safety is treated separately, usually under a HACCP plan or a preventive controls program.

But allergen labeling is a food safety control. Under the FDA's Preventive Controls for Human Food regulation (21 CFR Part 117), allergens are classified as a known or reasonably foreseeable hazard, and the rule requires manufacturers to have written preventive controls for allergen management — including labeling. When labeling is missing or wrong, you don't just have a label problem. You have a failure in your food safety system.

That's the lesson I'd take from the Loard's recall. Not that one company made a mistake, but that the mistake is possible wherever labeling isn't managed as a safety-critical process. The companies that avoid this outcome are the ones that built the control before they needed it.

If You're a Consumer: What to Do

If you purchased Loard's Ice Cream retail-packaged products recently and have any of the listed allergen sensitivities — milk, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, soy, or wheat — do not consume the product. The FDA recall notice indicates consumers should return the product to the place of purchase or discard it.

Consumers with questions can contact Silver Moon LP directly. Current recall details, including lot information and product descriptions, are posted on the FDA's recall database at fda.gov.

Anyone who believes they have experienced an adverse reaction to a recalled product should contact their healthcare provider and report the event through FDA's MedWatch program.

Working With a Consultant Before a Recall Forces the Conversation

Allergen labeling compliance and recall readiness aren't complicated subjects, but they do require someone to own them — to build the process, maintain it, and catch the gaps before they become FDA filings.

At Certify Consulting, I work with food companies across the production spectrum on exactly this kind of regulatory readiness. Whether that's building out a FALCPA-compliant labeling review process, completing a FASTER Act gap assessment for sesame, or developing a written recall plan that your team can actually execute, the goal is the same: get compliant before the phone rings.

Our track record includes food safety and compliance consulting for over 200 clients with a 100% first-time audit pass rate, and I've seen firsthand how much easier compliance is when it's built into operations rather than bolted on after the fact.

If you're unsure where your labeling program stands, the Loard's recall is a good prompt to find out. Learn more about our food safety compliance services and let's talk through where the gaps might be in your operation.

Source: FDA Recall Notice — Silver Moon LP dba Loard's Ice Cream, fda.gov

Last updated: 2026-05-03