Canned fruit cocktail never gets much attention. It goes in the cart because it is cheap, it goes in the cabinet behind the black beans, and it gets opened whenever somebody wants a quick fruit salad or a lunchbox filler. That slowness is exactly why this one is worth two minutes of your time. The recalled cans carry a best-if-used-by date of SEP 01 2027, so plenty of them could still be sitting in American kitchens.
The product is Great Value Fruit Cocktail in Fruit Juice from Concentrate, sold in 15-ounce cans at Walmart stores in seven states. The Food and Drug Administration has classified a recall covering 1,836 cases of 24 cans each, or 44,064 cans, over the potential for contamination with elevated levels of lead.
The Three Codes That Decide Whether Your Can Counts
Brand name alone does not tell you anything here. The recall is tied to one specific lot of cans, and three markings separate it from every other can of Great Value fruit cocktail on the shelf.
Look for the lot code 6FCB 04 C2263, the UPC 078742369570, and the best-if-used-by date printed as SEP 01 2027. The cans are 15 ounces. If your can is missing any one of those, it is not part of this action.
The lot code is usually stamped, not printed, so it can be faint. On a lot of canned goods it runs along the rim of the lid or the bottom, in dot-matrix ink that smudges. Tilt the can under a light instead of squinting at the paper label.
Seven States Got The Shipment
The cans went to Walmart stores in Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wyoming. That is a scattered map: two Deep South states, two in the Southwest, one in the Mountain West, one in the Pacific Northwest and one in the Mid-Atlantic.
The volume is 1,836 cases, packed 24 cans to a case. That arithmetic is where the 44,064 figure comes from, and it is a small number by Walmart standards. One lot, split across seven states, averages about 260 cases per state rather than a wall of cans in every store.
If you live outside those seven states, your odds of owning one of these cans are low. Not zero, since groceries travel with people, but low enough that the code check is a formality.
Walmart Did Not Actually Can This Fruit
Great Value is a label, not a cannery. The company that packed and pulled this product is Pacific Coast Producers of Lodi, California, and it was Pacific Coast Producers that started the recall voluntarily on Oct. 1, 2026.
Store brands work this way across almost every aisle. An outside processor fills the cans, the retailer’s name goes on the paper, and the price comes down because there is no national ad budget baked into it. The trade-off is that the name on the front of the can is rarely the name of the company that decides when something comes off the line.
This matters for a practical reason. When you are checking your pantry, the manufacturer’s name will not be anywhere on the label you are looking at. The lot code is the only link back to the plant.
What A Class II Recall Means In Plain English
The FDA sorts recalls into three tiers, and this one landed in the middle. The agency defines a Class II event as a situation in which use of or exposure to a product “may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences,” or where the probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote.
So it is not the agency’s top alarm, and it is not a shrug either. The classification is a judgment about the category of risk, not a measurement of what is in any individual can.
On lead specifically, the FDA’s longstanding position is that no safe level of exposure has been identified, which is why these cases move to a recall even when the amounts involved are small. That is the reasoning behind the action, and it is the whole reason a fruit cocktail lot gets a federal file number.
The Recall Started Three Weeks Before Most People Heard About It
A recall and a recall classification are two separate steps, and the gap between them is why this story surfaced in late October for a product that was pulled at the start of the month.
Pacific Coast Producers moved first, on Oct. 1. The FDA designated it Class II on Oct. 20. The news reached shoppers on Oct. 21 and 22, which is when most of them would have seen anything about it at all.
That lag is normal for food recalls and it is also the most annoying thing about them. The company acts quietly and quickly, the paperwork catches up, and by the time the headline reaches your phone the product has been off the truck for weeks. Which is fine for things that spoil. It is less fine for a can with a 2027 date on it.
What The Notice Does Not Explain
The FDA’s enforcement record does not say how the elevated lead levels were found. There is no account of the testing, no explanation of what prompted it, and no description of where in the process the problem turned up.
What the record does show is the sequence: the product moved from Walmart shelves into a federal recall after the manufacturer acted on Oct. 1. Everything else in the filing is identifiers, case counts and distribution states.
That is typical of enforcement reports and it is worth knowing before you go looking for more. The documents are built to tell you which units to remove, not to tell you the story behind them.
Nobody Has Said How Many Cans Were Sold
The FDA did not say whether any of the recalled cans reached store shelves, and as of Oct. 22 Walmart had not posted a recall notice on its website. Product can be held at a distribution center or pulled from a back room before anyone stocks it, but nobody has said how much of this lot was.
Assuming you are in the clear is the wrong move. Any can that was sold went home with somebody, and canned fruit does not get eaten on a schedule.
Check the pantry anyway. It takes less time than reading this paragraph.
If You Find A Can That Matches
The advice is simple: do not eat it. Return the can to Walmart or dispose of it safely. Nobody is asking you to open it, inspect the fruit or make a judgment call about whether it looks fine.
If you want to handle it in person, the customer service desk at your local Walmart is the place to take questions about the product. Bring the can so the code is in front of somebody rather than being read off a phone screen.
One practical note: snap a photo of the lot code before you hand the can over. If anything comes up later, that picture is the only record you will have.
Nothing Else In The Great Value Line Is Involved
The recall covers one lot of one product. No other lots of Great Value Fruit Cocktail in Fruit Juice from Concentrate are included, and no other Great Value products are part of it.
That distinction gets flattened the second a recall story starts traveling. Somebody sees “Walmart” and “lead” in the same sentence and decides the entire store brand is suspect, which is both wrong and exhausting. The peaches next to it, the mandarin oranges, the fruit cocktail with a different lot code on the lid: all untouched by this.
Recalls are narrow on purpose. The whole point of a lot code is that a company can pull 1,836 cases instead of everything it has ever made.
Our Take
This is a small recall with an unusually long tail. Forty-four thousand cans is nothing for a retailer the size of Walmart. The 2027 date is what changes the math. Shelf-stable food sits around, gets pushed to the back, gets packed into a box when somebody moves, and resurfaces a year later with the recall long forgotten.
So treat the lot code as the only thing worth reading on the can: 6FCB 04 C2263, UPC 078742369570, SEP 01 2027. If all three line up, it goes back to the store or in the trash. If they do not, you are done and you can go back to your evening.
Store-brand canned fruit is not the villain of this story. One lot from one packer in Lodi, California, is. Cheap pantry staples are still worth buying, and the system that caught this is the same one that lets a company pull a few pallets instead of pretending nothing happened. Check your cabinet, then move on.
