Is your cachito safe? High-risk health recall is issued

In a high-risk health recall, North Miami Beach-based Panna Cafe To Go is recalling 1,951 pounds of meat and poultry products produced this summer because they weren’t federally inspected, yet still bore unauthorized marks of USDA inspection.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition of a Class I recall is “a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.”

According to the USDA’s release announcing the recall, various brands of ham and chicken cachitos and empanadas comprise the 18 different product types (labels can be seen here) that were shipped to retailers in Florida. The products, which are heat-treated but not fully cooked or shelf stable, were packed between June 2 and last Wednesday and have “EST. 40245 or P-40245” inside the USDA mark of inspection.

Anyone with these products should either throw them away or return them to the store where they were bought for a refund.

The USDA says it discovered the problem when Food Safety and Inspection Service people “visited the uninspected facility following their application for a federal grant of inspection that had not yet been approved.”

Plant manager Luis Villegas said the products were made at Panna Cafe’s USDA-inspected facility, put on carts and taken on refrigerated trucks to the company’s new, larger facility, where they were packaged. Villegas said he didn’t know doing that violated any regulations.

“That was my mistake,” he said. “But the products were never contaminated. They were on refrigerated trucks.”

Villegas said the company was meeting with USDA officials on Monday and hoped to get the new facility approved later this week or next week.

This story was originally published August 22, 2016 at 10:01 AM with the headline "Is your cachito safe? High-risk health recall is issued."