If you’ve ever eaten a meal on an international flight and wondered who actually made that food, you’re not alone. Turns out the FDA has been wondering the same thing, and what they found at one major airline catering company is genuinely alarming. The agency just issued formal warning letters to two food operations: DO&CO, an international airline caterer with multiple U.S. facilities, and a Florida bakery. The violations include recurring Listeria contamination, allergen labeling failures, filthy equipment, and employee hygiene problems that read like a horror story for anyone who’s ever unwrapped a foil tray at 35,000 feet.
What the FDA Found at DO&CO’s Airline Catering Facilities
DO&CO is an Austrian-headquartered company that operates airline catering kitchens across the United States. They prepare ready-to-eat meals that get loaded onto planes and served to passengers. The FDA’s warning letter, dated March 30, 2026, came after the agency inspected four DO&CO facilities between June and August of 2025. But this story actually starts earlier than that.
Back in 2024, the FDA conducted what are called “for-cause inspections” at multiple DO&CO locations. The problems they uncovered were bad enough to trigger a corporate regulatory meeting in January 2025, where FDA officials sat down with DO&CO leadership in person to discuss what they described as “significant sanitation issues and widespread concerns with Listeria findings in RTE finished products and on direct food-contact surfaces in several facilities.” That’s bureaucratic language for: they found a dangerous pathogen all over the places where your airplane food was being made.
Twelve Different Strains of Listeria Across Multiple Kitchens
The lab results from the FDA inspections paint a troubling picture. Environmental swabs collected during the 2024 inspections came back positive for Listeria monocytogenes at multiple DO&CO facilities. Finished product testing at the New York location found L. monocytogenes in the actual food. The Detroit facility was even worse, testing positive for L. monocytogenes along with Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus.
When the FDA came back in 2025, they found that DO&CO had actually stopped testing its own finished products. Meanwhile, environmental samples collected by both the FDA and the company itself still showed Listeria present in multiple facilities. Using whole genome sequencing (WGS), the FDA identified twelve distinct strains of L. monocytogenes across DO&CO’s New York, Illinois, and Michigan locations. Five of those strains were found in a single facility across both years, meaning the contamination was persistent. Three strains showed up in multiple facilities across both years, suggesting the problem was spreading or being carried between kitchens.
Here’s the part that should make you pay attention: one of those strains matched clinical isolates. In plain English, that means the specific type of Listeria found in DO&CO’s kitchens is the same type that has caused actual illness in real people. The FDA informed DO&CO about these WGS results on July 24, 2025.
Why This Matters for Airline Passengers
The United States maintains a zero-tolerance policy for Listeria monocytogenes in food. That’s stricter than many other countries. Canada and the European Union, for example, allow up to 100 CFU per gram in some products (though the EU is tightening its standards in 2026). In the U.S., any detectable amount in ready-to-eat food is a violation. Period.
DO&CO doesn’t make food that sits on a grocery store shelf where you can read a label and decide whether to buy it. They make food that gets handed to you on a plane, often without any ingredient information at all. You eat what you’re given, or you don’t eat. There’s no scanning a barcode with your phone, no checking a use-by date, no reading the back of the package. That makes the sanitation and safety standards at these facilities even more important, because passengers have essentially zero control over what they’re consuming.
The FDA’s warning letter states clearly that DO&CO’s sanitation procedures “have been inadequate to significantly minimize or prevent L. monocytogenes in the facilities.” The recurring presence of contamination across multiple kitchens, across multiple years, is the kind of pattern that suggests a systemic failure, not a one-time accident.
The Florida Bakery and Its Allergen Problems
The second warning letter went to a Florida bakery. While the specific identity of this bakery in the current enforcement action hasn’t been fully detailed in public reporting yet, the violations follow a pattern the FDA has documented repeatedly at bakery operations throughout the state and the country.
The violations at the bakery included allergen labeling failures, meaning products were going out the door without properly declaring what allergens they contained. They also included insanitary equipment and employee hygiene lapses. For a bakery making ready-to-eat products, these are serious problems. Bakery products are one of the top five food types most frequently involved in allergen recalls, according to FDA data.
Allergen cross-contact in bakeries happens when shared equipment is used for products with different allergen profiles without adequate cleaning between runs. Think about a mixer that just processed dough with sesame seeds being used immediately afterward for plain bread rolls. Or a turntable that held a cake containing nuts being used for a nut-free product. When the labels on those products don’t reflect what’s actually in them (or on them), people with allergies have no way to protect themselves.
Nine Allergens the FDA Watches For
The FDA currently recognizes nine major food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Sesame was added to the list relatively recently, and it keeps showing up in enforcement actions because some operations haven’t updated their procedures. A peer-reviewed study analyzing FDA warning letters found that failure to identify and evaluate hazards requiring preventive controls was among the most frequently cited violations.
About one-third of foods reported to the FDA through the Reportable Food Registry as serious risks between 2009 and 2014 involved undeclared allergens. Milk is the single most common cause of allergen-related recalls. For bakeries specifically, the risks multiply because so many common baking ingredients overlap with major allergens: wheat flour, eggs, butter, soy lecithin, tree nuts, sesame seeds. One slip in the cleaning process and a product labeled “nut-free” suddenly isn’t.
How FDA Warning Letters Actually Work
A warning letter from the FDA isn’t a fine or a shutdown order. It’s a formal notification that the agency has found significant violations and expects the company to fix them. Business owners have 15 working days to respond with a plan for corrective action. If they don’t respond, or if the response isn’t adequate, the FDA can escalate to more aggressive enforcement actions including product seizure and injunction.
What most people don’t realize is that warning letters often come long after the initial problems were identified. The FDA typically gives companies time to correct issues on their own before resorting to formal letters. In DO&CO’s case, the company was given a face-to-face meeting with regulators in January 2025 to discuss the Listeria problems found in 2024. The fact that a warning letter followed in March 2026 suggests the company’s corrective actions weren’t sufficient.
It’s also worth knowing that some warning letters aren’t posted publicly until weeks or even months after they’re sent. So by the time you’re reading about this, the companies have already had their 15-day window to respond.
What Passengers and Consumers Should Know Right Now
There’s no product recall associated with these warning letters at this time. The FDA’s action is directed at the companies’ manufacturing practices, not at specific products currently on shelves or being served on flights. But the findings raise obvious questions about how much oversight exists in airline catering, an industry that operates mostly out of sight.
DO&CO serves airlines around the world. If you’ve flown internationally in the last few years, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve eaten food prepared in one of their kitchens. The company operates facilities in New York, Detroit, Illinois, and other locations across the U.S. The FDA found Listeria contamination at multiple sites, across multiple years, with strains that match illness-causing bacteria. And at one point, the company stopped testing its own finished products.
For the Florida bakery, consumers who buy from local or regional bakeries should always check labels carefully, especially if anyone in the household has food allergies. If a product doesn’t have clear allergen labeling, that’s a red flag regardless of where you bought it.
The FDA’s enforcement actions this spring suggest the agency is paying close attention to multi-facility operations where contamination problems persist over time. Whether that translates into meaningful changes at companies like DO&CO remains to be seen. For now, the warning letters are public record, and the clock is ticking for both companies to respond.
