On paper, recalls are a flowchart: identify the lot, notify customers, remove product, and document everything. In real life, a recall starts as a half-formed worry—an email from a supplier, a lab result that doesn’t look right, or a customer complaint that arrives right before the weekend. What separates a manageable incident from a brand-level emergency is rarely luck. It’s a rehearsal.
Pacific Seafood says it has built its business around “transparency and traceability,” including “proprietary traceability technology” designed to follow product “from the dock to the dinner table.” That’s a bold claim in a category where seafood can change hands many times—harvest crews, docks, trucks, cold storage, processing lines, distribution centers, then retail or foodservice.
But “traceability” isn’t a slogan you hang on a website. In the most practical sense, it’s a timed performance under pressure: can your team find every affected case, everywhere it is, fast enough to protect consumers and prove control to regulators and customers?
That’s why companies run mock recalls—deliberate fire drills that are meant to feel uncomfortable.
Why Drill at All? Because Recalls Are Expensive and Speed Is the Only Lever You Truly Control
A widely cited industry benchmark puts the average cost of a recall for participating food and consumer product companies at $10 million, before brand damage and lost sales are tallied. (Even if you debate the exact average, the order of magnitude is the point: a recall is a financial event as much as a safety event.)
Another industry survey on recall losses found that for companies that faced a recall in the prior five years, 77% estimated total financial impact at up to $30 million, while 23% reported higher costs. The upper tail matters: a “big” recall isn’t just bigger—it’s qualitatively different, because complexity explodes when the product has spread across multiple warehouses, customers, and geographies.
So the rehearsal is designed to answer a blunt question: If something goes wrong, can you shrink the blast radius?
The “Friday Afternoon” Test: What a Mock Recall Actually Looks Like
A good mock recall begins like a real one—without theatrics.
A coordinator (often QA/food safety) selects a scenario. SQF—one of the major Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) schemes—explicitly recommends practicing common real-world triggers such as allergen mislabeling, environmental pathogens like Listeria and Salmonella, and foreign material contamination.
Then the timer starts.
The first task is deceptively simple: name the product and the lot. The rehearsal typically uses a real production code, a real ship date, a real customer order—because the purpose is to test the system you actually use, not the one you wish you had.
From there, the drill splits into two simultaneous sprints:
- Containment (stop the bleeding): place holds on affected inventory, freeze shipments, and prevent substitution errors.
- Reconstruction (build the story): prove “one step back, one step forward” traceability—what inputs went into the lot, and which customers received it.
Pacific Seafood’s CSR report describes a control environment aimed at that “build the story” requirement: supplier screening includes checking for FDA rejections, alerts, and recalls; shipments require a “Positive Release Form”; and documentation includes “assigned date coding for traceability” plus species-dependent testing requirements.
Traceability Isn’t Just Data It’s People Who Can Interpret It Under Stress
Mock recalls reveal a truth that tech vendors don’t love to emphasize: the hard part isn’t storing data; it’s making it legible at speed.
Pacific Seafood notes it invests in “the latest food safety technology, monitoring equipment, and rigorous training programs,” while emphasizing that “dedicated team members are at the heart” of QA. That framing is consistent with how effective recalls work in practice. When minutes matter, teams don’t just query a database—they debate ambiguity:
- Does this lot include rework?
- Was the product split across multiple finished-good SKUs?
- Did a pallet get re-labeled in a cross-dock move?
- Did any portion ship via air freight or third-party logistics?
These are the moments when a rehearsal becomes valuable, because it exposes the fragile links: a handwritten note no one can read, a spreadsheet column that isn’t standardized, a warehouse location code that means different things to different sites.
What Gets Measured: The “Four Questions” Every Rehearsal Must Answer
Most mock recalls, whether in seafood, produce, or packaged food,s aim to answer four operational questions:
- What exactly is affected? (product, lot, quantity, pack format)
- Where is it now? (on-site, in transit, at distribution, at customer)
- Who must be notified? (internal leaders, regulators as appropriate, customers, and sometimes the public)
- What is the corrective action? (root cause, prevention, verification)
SQF guidance is explicit that you should test all elements of the recall plan at least annually, including contacts, investigation steps, communications, and actions taken for the affected product. In other words, if your drill is just “can we trace a lot,” it’s not enough. The point is to test the organization.
Pacific Seafood’s CSR report highlights programs and audit frameworks that, by design, reinforce those organizational muscles—SQF and BRCGS among them—along with HACCP and third-party inspection programs.
The Seafood-Specific Twist: Time-Temperature and Biology Don’t Wait
Seafood recalls can be uniquely unforgiving because quality degradation and pathogen risk are tightly tied to time and temperature. Even when the issue is “only” a labeling error, customers may choose to discard the product rather than sort uncertainty in a cooler. That’s why mock recalls in seafood often include a parallel cold-chain review:
- Did any shipments experience temperature excursions?
- Were any loads delayed at a transfer point?
- Are there records showing continuous control?
Pacific Seafood’s CSR report describes its logistics role as maintaining “continuation of our cold chain” from processing to distribution to customers. In a rehearsal, that claim becomes an audit trail, temperature logs, seal records, carrier handoffs, and proof that “hold” instructions actually stop movement.
The Lab Layer: When Testing Results Trigger the Drill
Mock recalls often use a lab-style trigger because that’s how many real incidents start: a presumptive positive, an environmental swab result, or a verification test outside spec.
Pacific Seafood reports “regular environmental and pathogen testing” and says its ready-to-eat products undergo testing on “a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.” It also describes routine species identification and lab testing (including DNA and net weight tests), plus a minimum number of receiving checks and distribution-site inspections annually.
In a rehearsal, the lab trigger forces operational decisions that look mundane but matter enormously:
- Do you place a product on hold immediately or wait for confirmation?
- Who has the authority to widen the hold from one lot to a date range?
- How do you communicate uncertainty to customers without causing panic?
The answers are rarely perfect, but the rehearsal teaches the company how to choose.
The “Tabletop” Nobody Wants: Crisis Communications in Plain Language
A technically flawless trace that arrives with a confusing customer notice is still a failure.
The best drills include a communications segment—drafting the email a distributor will forward, the call script a sales rep will use, and the internal update executives will read. The goal is clarity:
- What happened (only what you know)
- What product is involved (how to identify it)
- What action the customer must take (hold, segregate, return, destroy)
- What happens next (follow-up timing, refunds, replacements)
This is also where rehearsals confront the uncomfortable financial reality. Marsh, in a risk briefing, notes the “average” recall cost figure and emphasizes that brand damage is often the multiplier. A drill is one of the few moments a company can practice speaking plainly before it has to do so publicly.
The Regulatory Horizon: Traceability Expectations Are Rising
Even without a specific incident, the industry is moving toward more structured traceability requirements. The FDA’s Food Traceability Rule (FSMA Section 204) originally set a single compliance date of January 20, 2026, for covered entities.
But in March 2025, the FDA announced its intention to extend the compliance date by 30 months, and in August 2025, the agency issued a proposed rule that—if finalized—would move the compliance date from January 20, 2026, to July 20, 2028.
For companies already running robust mock recalls, that extension doesn’t mean “relax.” It means you have time to do what drills are best at: find the weakest links, fix them, and prove the fix worked.
What a Rehearsal Ultimately Buys: Confidence You Can Document
The most valuable output of a mock recall is not a congratulatory email. It’s an after-action report with receipts:
- timestamps
- decision logs (who approved what, when)
- screenshots or system extracts showing holds and inventory disposition
- customer notification evidence
- a corrective action plan with owners and deadlines
Pacific Seafood’s CSR report frames this culture as continuous investment in teams, training, and verification processes supported by external audits and internal programs. That’s the right direction of travel for any company in high-risk protein: make the response muscle memory, not improvisation.
Because when the real alert arrives, the difference between “hours” and “days” isn’t just efficiency; it’s how many people might get hurt, how much product gets wasted, and whether your customers believe you’re in control.
