Industry Report

The Thanksgiving Table Risk Report 2026

Where the risk sits on the US Thanksgiving table, by ingredient and origin. What was refused at the border, what was recalled inside the country, and five checks before the holiday peak.

INGREDIENT GROUPS

41,679

US AUTHORITY RECORDS

72%

REFUSED AT THE BORDER

22.4M

GLOBAL RESIDUE RESULTS

Seasonal volume arrives long before the season does

By the time Thanksgiving is in the news, the material has been bought, blended and shipped. The risk on this table is not in the kitchen, it is in what arrived months earlier and in what the paperwork said about it. And most of what goes wrong never reaches a plant at all. It is stopped at the border, in records a quality team rarely sees, by an authority that was never going to call them.

One view of where the risk sits, by ingredient and by origin

This report reads 41,679 records logged by six US food safety authorities across the seven ingredient groups on the Thanksgiving table, with one event counted once. It puts each group against the countries the product actually came from, separates what was refused at the border from what was recalled inside the country, because the two need different controls, and sets the enforcement record next to residue results from 34 national monitoring programs. Every figure names the filter that produced it, and where the record is thin the report says so instead of filling the gap.

What’s inside the report

A scorecard of seven ingredient groups by origin: spices, stuffing, dairy, nuts, pumpkin, turkey and potatoes, against the countries the product came from.
Where each group’s record is made: a refusal at the border, an entry on an import alert, or a recall inside the country.
What the testing finds: residue results from 34 national monitoring programs, global rather than US, and four substance and ingredient pairs where the failure rate sits far off the group average.
Five checks before the peak, each one tied to a specific figure on an earlier page.
The method in full: the six US authority sources, how one event is counted once, and the places where we hold no data and say so.

Who it's for

FSQA, supplier quality and regulatory leads at US food manufacturers who produce, source or co-pack these ingredients for the holiday season. It is written for people who already know an import alert from a recall, so it skips the briefing and goes to the record.

Prepared by

SGS FOODNEXUS Data & Research

Food fraud intelligence

The index is compiled by the SGS FOODNEXUS data and research team from official food safety authority data across global markets, and reviewed by our food fraud specialists.