Over 2.2 Million Pounds of Golden Island Pork Jerky Pulled From Costco and Sam's Club Shelves
If you've got a bag of Golden Island Korean barbecue pork jerky sitting in your pantry right now — picked up on your last Costco run or tossed in the cart at Sam's Club — put it down. Don't open it. Don't eat it. Because the federal government wants that product back, and the reason is something nobody expects to find in a snack pouch: wiry fragments of metal shed from a factory conveyor belt.
On October 24, 2025, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced that LSI, Inc., an Alpena, South Dakota establishment, is recalling approximately 2,277,540 pounds of a ready-to-eat Korean barbecue pork jerky product that may be contaminated with pieces of metal. The sheer volume of the recall — more than a million kilograms of a ready-to-eat product distributed to two of the country's largest big-box retailers — is what makes this situation stand out, even in a year already marked by serious food safety incidents across the meat industry.
What Exactly Is Being Recalled
The recall covers 14.5-ounce and 16-ounce pouches of "GOLDEN ISLAND fire-grilled PORK JERKY Korean BARBECUE recipe," with "best by" dates of Oct. 23, 2025 through Sept. 23, 2026. That extended date range is significant: these products have a one-year shelf life, which means bags purchased months ago and still sitting in the back of a kitchen cabinet could be part of the affected run.
Roughly four dozen lots of jerky are affected. The packages bear establishment number "M279A" inside the USDA mark of inspection. That's the critical identifier consumers need to check — it appears stamped inside the official USDA inspection seal printed on the packaging. If those characters are present, the bag is part of this recall, full stop.
The USDA's website contains a complete list of the specific product lot codes and best-by dates subject to recall. Given the breadth of the affected production window, buyers who regularly stock up on jerky in bulk — exactly the kind of purchase Costco and Sam's Club are designed to encourage — face the highest likelihood of having an affected bag on hand.
How It Happened: A Conveyor Belt Failure With Nationwide Consequences
The FSIS said the company that produces the jerky, LSI, Inc. of Alpena, South Dakota, received multiple complaints from customers who found wiry pieces of metal in the packages. These weren't isolated, one-off reports. Multiple consumers independently contacted the company before LSI launched the investigation that traced the problem to its source. LSI determined that the metal came from a conveyor belt used in production.
Conveyor belts in meat processing facilities are workhorses — they run continuously through high-heat, high-pressure environments and carry product at every stage from raw cut to packaged final form. The wire or mesh components in belt systems can deteriorate, break down, and shed fragments, particularly when maintenance cycles are stretched or when belts are pushed beyond their operational limits. In this case, those fragments ended up embedded in or mixed with finished jerky that was then sealed, boxed, and shipped nationwide.
The scale of the problem — nearly 2.3 million pounds recalled — suggests that the contamination event wasn't confined to a single shift or a single production run. Forty-eight or so affected lots spanning roughly a year's worth of best-by dates points to an issue that persisted across a meaningful stretch of production time before enough customer complaints accumulated to trigger a formal investigation and recall.
The Health Risk: What Wiry Metal Actually Does to the Human Body
FSIS said there have been no confirmed reports of injuries, but it is concerned that some of the jerky could be in consumers' pantries. That caveat — "no confirmed injuries" — should not be interpreted as "no danger." It's a reflection of how difficult it is to connect a specific injury to a specific food product after the fact, particularly when the victim may not know what cut their mouth, cracked their tooth, or caused digestive discomfort.
Foreign material in food products poses health risks, including choking, tooth damage, and injury to the digestive tract. Small pieces of metal can obstruct airways, especially in vulnerable populations such as children and older adults. For a product like jerky — which is aggressively chewed and consumed in snack-sized amounts — the risk of a metal fragment making contact with soft tissue in the mouth, throat, or digestive tract is real. The chewy, dense texture of the product could make it especially easy for a wire fragment to remain hidden, camouflaged by the fibrous structure of the meat itself.
Wiry metal, specifically, presents a different challenge than, say, a hard chunk of metal or a bone shard. Wire can flex, curl, and puncture. A short, stiff wire embedded in a bite of jerky can behave like a fishhook in the esophagus or stomach lining. Anyone who consumed this product and later experienced unexplained throat irritation, difficulty swallowing, or gastrointestinal discomfort should consult a healthcare provider and mention the recall.
What Consumers Should Do Right Now
No injuries have been reported, but officials urged consumers not to eat the recalled jerky. "This product should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase," the Food Safety and Inspection Service said, adding that people with questions can contact the company at info@goldenislandjerky.com.
Consumers should check their jerky packages for the establishment number M279A inside the USDA mark of inspection. If those characters are present on your bag, don't try to eat around the problem and don't test it. The FSIS is explicit: discard the product or return it to the retailer for a full refund. Both Costco and Sam's Club have well-established return policies that handle recalls without requiring a receipt, which means getting your money back should be straightforward.
Consumers with food safety questions can also call the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline at 888-674-6854 or send an email to mphotline.fsis@usda.gov. That hotline is staffed by food safety professionals who can walk you through whether your specific product lot is affected, and what steps to take if you believe you or someone in your household may have consumed contaminated jerky.
Golden Island and LSI, Inc.: The Company Behind the Brand
Golden Island is a well-known jerky brand within the warehouse retail ecosystem, particularly at Costco, where it has built a following among shoppers who appreciate its Korean barbecue flavor profile — a combination of sweet soy, sesame, and char that separates it from standard American-style beef jerky. The Korean barbecue-inspired flavor has been a major driver of the brand's popularity as Korean cuisine and its bold flavor influences have moved into mainstream American food culture over the past decade.
The jerky is made by LSI, Inc. in Alpena, South Dakota. Alpena is a small agricultural community in the northeastern corner of South Dakota, and food manufacturing operations like LSI's are economically vital to towns of that size. LSI operates under USDA inspection, meaning federal inspectors are assigned to the facility and the company must meet federal standards for food safety and production hygiene. The fact that this contamination went undetected long enough to affect nearly 2.3 million pounds of product — and required consumer complaints rather than in-house detection to surface — raises questions about where the internal inspection and maintenance process broke down.
FSIS routinely conducts recall effectiveness checks to verify recalling firms notify their customers of the recall and that steps are taken to make certain that the product is no longer available to consumers. Those checks will be ongoing in the weeks ahead, and the agency will be tracking whether product is being pulled from shelves and whether any additional contaminated lots are identified.
A Troubling Pattern: This Isn't the Only Conveyor Belt Recall of 2025
What makes the Golden Island recall especially striking in context is that it didn't happen in isolation. Within days of LSI's announcement, a second massive meat recall landed for the same underlying reason — a deteriorating conveyor belt contaminating product at scale.
Hormel Foods Corporation, an Austin, Minnesota establishment, recalled approximately 4,874,815 pounds of foodservice ready-to-eat frozen chicken products that may be contaminated with pieces of metal. The affected chicken breast and thigh products were distributed to HRI Commercial Food Service locations nationwide on various dates from February 10, 2025, through September 19, 2025. That's nearly five million pounds of chicken that spent months in hotel and restaurant supply chains before the problem was caught.
The Austin, Minnesota-based company traced the contamination to metal fragments from a conveyor belt used during production. The pieces varied in size, measuring roughly 2mm by 17mm, according to FSIS. Those dimensions — about the diameter of a thick wire and the length of a thumbnail — are exactly the kind of fragment that could slip past visual inspection, especially in a production environment moving thousands of pounds of product per hour.
The issue was discovered after Hormel received multiple complaints from foodservice customers — including hotels, restaurants and other organizations that serve food to people — who reported finding metal in their frozen chicken breast and thigh products. Again: the detection mechanism was customer complaints, not internal quality control. That pattern — consumer-driven discovery rather than facility-level prevention — is a thread connecting both of these major recalls and one that will likely draw scrutiny from food safety advocates and regulators.
Two Massive Recalls, Same Root Cause, Same Detection Method
The near-simultaneous occurrence of two massive meat recalls, both tied to conveyor belt degradation, both discovered through consumer complaints rather than internal quality controls, is not something the food industry can dismiss as coincidence. Conveyor systems in meat processing are subject to routine inspection under HACCP — Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points — protocols that are federally mandated for all USDA-inspected establishments. The fact that belt degradation went undetected long enough to contaminate product across dozens of production lots suggests either that HACCP monitoring at these facilities was inadequate, that maintenance scheduling was insufficient, or that the degradation occurred in a way that wasn't captured by existing inspection checkpoints.
Contamination with rocks, sticks, insects and other foreign objects occasionally occurs in food produced in the U.S. Consumers who find foreign materials in food should notify manufacturers, food safety experts said. That's true as far as it goes, but the scale of these events — measured in the millions of pounds — moves them out of the category of occasional incidents and into something that warrants a harder look at whether existing safety protocols are adequate for high-volume, continuous-operation processing environments.
The Jerky Market, Big-Box Retail, and the Recall Ripple Effect
The jerky market in the United States has expanded dramatically over the past decade, driven by the rise of high-protein snacking, the popularity of keto and paleo dietary approaches, and the growing acceptance of globally inspired flavors. Korean barbecue as a flavor category has been particularly successful, and brands like Golden Island have ridden that wave to enormous sales volumes through warehouse retailers where bulk buying is the norm.
That model — producing at scale for Costco and Sam's Club, where a single SKU can account for millions of units — creates an inherent tension with food safety. The bigger the production run, the more product is at risk if a contamination event occurs. A small artisan jerky producer selling a few thousand bags a month faces a very different recall scenario than one manufacturing enough product to fill nearly 2.3 million pounds of pouches that end up in households across all fifty states.
For the consumer, buying in bulk at a warehouse club feels like a smart financial move — and usually is. But it also means that when a recall hits, the bags in your house are likely to be numerous, and the best-by dates may stretch out a year or more into the future, meaning product bought long ago might still be sitting around. That's precisely why FSIS is concerned that some product may be in consumers' pantries — the combination of bulk purchase behavior and long shelf life creates a scenario where affected product remains in active use long after the recall is issued.
How to Stay Ahead of Future Food Recalls
The Golden Island recall is a reminder that even trusted brands sold through trusted retailers can land on your kitchen shelf with a manufacturing defect. The USDA's FSIS maintains a publicly accessible recall database at fsis.usda.gov that is updated in real time. Bookmarking that page and checking it periodically when a new recall makes news is one of the most straightforward things any consumer can do to protect themselves and their household.
Beyond that, the FSIS offers a free email subscription service that pushes recall alerts directly to your inbox as they are announced. Signing up takes minutes and removes the reliance on news coverage to surface safety information that the agency is already publishing. For anyone who regularly buys meat, poultry, or processed meat snacks in bulk — and that describes a significant percentage of Costco and Sam's Club shoppers — that subscription is worth having.
When in doubt about a specific product, checking for the establishment number inside the USDA mark of inspection is the most reliable method of identification. Lot codes and best-by dates matter too, but the establishment number is specific to the producing facility and narrows down whether your exact product falls within the recall scope. Anyone concerned about an injury should contact a healthcare provider.
The Bottom Line
The Golden Island Korean barbecue pork jerky recall is one of the largest single meat product recalls of 2025, and it hits squarely in the pantry of the kind of American consumer who shops at warehouse clubs, buys in bulk, and keeps shelf-stable snacks on hand for months at a time. LSI Inc. recalled about 2.3 million pounds of its Golden Island Korean Barbecue recipe fire-grilled pork jerky for possible contamination with wiry metal pieces, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced October 24. The recalled product was distributed nationwide.
The combination of a long shelf life, bulk packaging, and distribution through two of the country's biggest retailers means this recall will take time to fully work its way through the supply chain and out of consumers' homes. If you're holding an affected bag, the math is simple: no amount of sunk cost justifies the risk of biting into a wire fragment. Return it, discard it, and check the FSIS database for any contact information or refund procedures you need. The jerky isn't worth it.
