The bag is yellow, it holds 22 ounces of frozen fettuccine in a lemon alfredo sauce, and it carries Walmart’s own bettergoods label. If one is sitting in your freezer, pull it out and read the back.
Gias Foods, Inc., a New York City company, is recalling two lots of bettergoods Authentic Italian Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine sold at Walmart stores nationwide after testing found the product may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. No illnesses have been reported. The announcement went out on Sept. 15, 2026.
Listeria monocytogenes can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people and anyone with a weakened immune system. Healthy people may get only short-term symptoms: high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea. In pregnant women it can cause miscarriage and stillbirth.
The Two Lot Codes That Matter
Only two production lots are covered: L6079C and L6080C. Those codes are stamped on the back of the package, next to an expiration date of either 09/19/2027 or 09/20/2027. The UPC is 194346442706.
Everything else about the package stays the same, which is why the lot code is the only thing worth squinting at. It is a 22-ounce yellow plastic bag, sold frozen, under a store label you have probably walked past a dozen times. Nothing on the front tells you whether yours is one of the affected lots.
Take a photo of the back panel with your phone before you toss the bag or hand it over at the service desk. If there is any back and forth about the return, that picture is your proof that the numbers matched.
Why It Could Still Be Sitting In Your Freezer
Those expiration dates land in September 2027. That is a full year of shelf life on a frozen entree, and it is the reason this recall is more annoying than most. A bag of refrigerated pasta salad with a use-by date next Tuesday sorts itself out. A frozen dinner rated good until 2027 gets shoved behind the ice cream and the bag of peas and forgotten until somebody has a bad week and needs dinner in fifteen minutes.
Freezer inventory is also the part of the kitchen nobody audits. Most people know roughly what is in the fridge. Almost nobody can tell you what is in the bottom drawer of the freezer without getting on their knees and digging.
So this is worth ten seconds of actual digging. Move the frozen pizzas, check for yellow, read the codes. If you bought bettergoods pasta in the past couple of months and already ate it, watch for the symptoms above. Listeriosis can take up to 70 days to appear, so see a doctor if it does and say you may have been exposed to Listeria.
State Labs Caught It, Not Shoppers
The recall came out of a routine sampling program run by the Washington State Department of Agriculture and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Those samples flagged the finished product itself as possibly contaminated.
Finished product is the phrase to notice. This was not a swab of a drain or a wall in a plant somewhere. It was the packaged pasta itself, the same sealed bag a shopper would carry out to the parking lot.
Two state agriculture departments on opposite corners of the country sample food as a matter of routine, without anybody complaining first. That is how this one surfaced. Gias Foods has stopped distributing the product while it and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration keep investigating what caused the problem.
The Brand Is Walmart’s, The Factory Is Not
bettergoods is a Walmart store brand, and the recall was issued by Gias Foods, not by Walmart. That split confuses people every time it happens, and it is completely normal. Store brands are almost always made by outside manufacturers who pack the retailer’s label onto their own production line, which means the company recalling the pasta is a name most shoppers have never heard.
It also means the refund and the recall run on two different tracks. Gias Foods is the one that pulled the product and is fielding questions about it. Walmart is the one holding your receipt.
Walmart has said on its corporate site that when a recall is issued, “we work swiftly to block the item from being sold and remove it from our stores and clubs.” In practice that means the bags should already be off the freezer shelves.
How To Get Your Money Back
Anyone who bought the recalled lots is being told to return the pasta to the place of purchase for a full refund. For nearly everyone, that means the Walmart you bought it from. You do not need to argue the science at the counter; the lot code on the back of the bag is the whole case.
If hauling a frozen bag back across town is not happening, the other option is to get it out of the house entirely, deep in the trash where a curious dog cannot drag it back out. Do not leave it in the freezer with a mental note to deal with it later. Mental notes are how recalled food gets eaten.
Gias Foods is directing consumers with questions to sales@giasfoods.com and says it will answer within 24 hours. The release also lists a phone contact, Gianluca Morrone, at 917-675-4890. Questions about the refund itself are faster at the store, since Walmart is the one processing them.
You Cannot Tell By Looking At It
Listeria monocytogenes does not announce itself. Food carrying it may not look, smell or taste spoiled, so the sniff test people run on questionable leftovers tells you nothing here. Freezing is no help either: the FDA says the bacteria grows at refrigeration temperatures and freezing will not eliminate or reduce it. So the two moves people instinctively reach for are both dead ends.
Opening the bag to check is pointless. Tasting a bite to see if it seems fine is worse than pointless.
The lot code is the only real information available to a shopper standing at the freezer door. Either it matches L6079C or L6080C, or it does not.
What Is Not Part Of This Recall
Two lots of one product. That is the scope. Bags of the same Authentic Italian Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine carrying different lot codes and different expiration dates are not covered, and neither is anything else wearing a bettergoods label.
Recall coverage has a way of sliding in people’s memory into “the Walmart pasta,” then “Walmart frozen food,” then a vague plan to avoid the whole aisle. This one is narrower than that, and the paperwork says so: one UPC, two lot numbers, two expiration dates.
The distribution, though, was as wide as it gets. The pasta went to Walmart stores nationwide, so there is no geography that lets you skip the check. A 22-ounce yellow bag in Tacoma and one in Tampa are the same bag.
The Part Nobody Has Answered Yet
Why the bacteria showed up in finished product is still unresolved. Gias Foods said it halted distribution while it and the FDA look for the cause, and no source of contamination has been publicly identified.
Nobody has reported getting sick, either, which is the best sentence in this entire story.
Until the investigation closes, the only facts a shopper needs are the ones printed on the bag. Two lot codes, one UPC, two dates in September 2027.
Take The Bag Back
A frozen pasta dinner is not worth a coin flip, and the return is about as easy as returns get. The company is offering a full refund at the place of purchase, with nothing required beyond the code stamped on the back.
So check the freezer tonight instead of next weekend. Flip the bag, read the lot number, and if it says L6079C or L6080C, it goes in the car and not in the oven. If it says anything else, put it back and make dinner.
And if you cleaned out the freezer in August and cannot remember what you threw away, let it go. The product was caught in routine testing, and the entire action covers two lots of one 22-ounce bag.
