Kettle Cuisine Recalls 3,240 Walmart Tomato Bisque Soup Kits Over Listeria Risk in 29 States

What happened

Kettle Cuisine LLC, a food manufacturer based in Lynn, Massachusetts, recalled 3,240 packages of Marketside Tomato Bisque Soup Kits after the company's own routine testing came back with a presumptive positive result for Listeria monocytogenes, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA posted the recall notice on August 12.

The soup kits, sold exclusively at select Walmart stores, went out to retailers between June 30 and July 7 across 29 states: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin and West Virginia, per the FDA notice cited by Fox Business, CBS News and others.

The recalled kits come in 14-ounce packages with UPC 194346474004 and a best-by/use-by date of August 22, 2026. As of Monday, no confirmed illnesses have been linked to the product, according to both the FDA and Kettle Cuisine.

Why it matters

Listeria monocytogenes isn't like your average food-poisoning bug. It survives and grows even in the refrigerator, which is exactly why the FDA and food-safety experts treat these recalls with more urgency than a typical spoiled-food scare.

Healthy adults might get off easy with a rough week: fever, headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea. But the CDC and FDA both flag the real danger zone: pregnant women, newborns, people over 65, and anyone with a weakened immune system. In pregnant women, listeriosis has been tied to miscarriage and stillbirth.

Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director at the Public Interest Research Group, told Newsweek that anyone with more severe symptoms, including a stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance or convulsions, along with any pregnant woman showing symptoms, should seek medical care immediately.

What consumers should actually do

The FDA's guidance is blunt: don't eat it, don't sell it, don't serve it. Throw it away or take it back to Walmart for a refund.

And don't play detective with your nose. The FDA specifically warns that you cannot rely on smell or appearance to determine whether the soup is contaminated, a point CBS News highlighted directly from the agency's own notice.

If the soup touched your fridge, containers, utensils or countertops, clean and sanitize all of it. Cross-contamination is exactly how a recall on one product turns into a bigger kitchen problem.

Consumers with questions can call the Kettle Cuisine hotline at 617-409-1104, weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET, according to Yahoo News.

The one real gap in the coverage

One unanswered question persists: whether that "presumptive positive" from Kettle Cuisine's internal testing has since been confirmed by an independent lab or the FDA. Fox Business explicitly asked Kettle Cuisine and Walmart about this, including whether additional lots are being tested, and got no answer by publication. Presumptive positives sometimes get confirmed, sometimes don't. Until Kettle Cuisine or the FDA says which, the "no confirmed illnesses" line carries considerable weight in every headline, including this one.

Walmart itself has been essentially silent in public reporting. CBS News noted Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Fox Business got the same non-response when it asked whether all affected products had been pulled from shelves and how customers were being notified. For a recall covering 29 states, that's a retailer leaving reporters and shoppers to lean entirely on the manufacturer and the FDA for answers.

What's next

The recalled kits carry an August 22, 2026 best-by date, so anyone still holding one has less than a week before the product would have expired anyway. That doesn't make it safe to eat in the meantime.

Kettle Cuisine says it's continuing to investigate in coordination with the FDA, but neither has announced a timeline for confirming or ruling out contamination beyond the initial test. Until that happens, or until Walmart clarifies what it's doing to pull remaining stock and notify buyers, the status is clear: recall issued, zero confirmed illnesses, and one unanswered question about whether the initial lab result holds up under further testing.