The Recall Notice That Asked Me to Check 24 Dates by Hand

In August, Costco Canada emailed members a recall notice for two Greek Gods yogurts. To find out whether the tub in your fridge was affected, you had to compare a printed code against a list of 24 of them. This is a good notice, honestly written, and it shows what the old model can and cannot do.

On August 11, Costco Canada sent members an important recall notice for The Greek Gods Honey Yogurt 2 x 650 g and The Greek Gods Organic Yogurt Plain 2 x 650 g, items 245554 and 1774521, bought at a Costco warehouse or Costco Business Centre between June and August 2026. Its one-sentence reason: “Hain Celestial is recalling certain best before dates due to the potential presence of mold in the product.” Members can return the yogurt for a full refund.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s notice covers the same two products and lists the same codes. It classes the reason as “Food - Microbial contamination - Non harmful (quality or spoilage)” and lists the distribution as national.

Nothing here is a scandal. A manufacturer found a problem, a retailer told the people who bought the product, and the notice says plainly what to do. Costco’s member notification is about the best version of the old recall model there is: it knows who bought the item, it can email them directly, and it did. The interesting part is what the notice has to ask of the person reading it.

What the notice actually says to check

Nothing on the package is named by lot number in the Costco notice. The affected units are named by the best before code printed on the tub. Here they are, exactly as the notice prints them.

Honey Yogurt (16 codes):

2026AU01 2026AU02 2026AU08 2026AU09 2026AU15 2026AU16 2026AU18 2026AU22 2026AU23 2026AU25 2026AU29 2026SE05 2026SE06 2026SE12 2026SE13 2026SE15

Organic Plain Yogurt (8 codes):

2026AU09 2026AU18 2026AU23 2026AU25 2026AU29 2026SE05 2026SE12 2026SE13

That is 24 codes across the two products, and every one of the eight Organic Plain codes also appears in the Honey list. The format is a year, a two-letter month (AU for August, SE for September) and a day. It is readable by a person and by no register, phone or inventory system that has not been taught this one manufacturer’s convention.

Look at how narrow the list is. The Honey Yogurt codes run from August 1 to September 15, a span of 46 days, and only 16 of those days are named. The Organic Plain codes span 36 days and name 8. A tub dated August 3 or September 14 is not on the list, even though it sits inside the range. Read as a range, the notice would recall too much; read as a list, it takes care. The list is the right answer, and it puts the work on the reader: find the tub, find the code, run your eye down a column.

The same list as GS1 data

A GS1 Digital Link can carry a date in one of two Application Identifiers, and the difference matters. AI 15 is the best before date, a quality date. AI 17 is the expiration date, the date after which the product should not be used at all. The working rule we use is that AI 15 says “mark it down” and AI 17 says “pull it.” Written the same way, the first Honey code, 2026AU01, becomes AI 15 with the value 260801 (year, month, day, two digits each).

This notice is about a best before date, so AI 15 is the honest encoding, and that is the interesting part. The date was never designed to identify a batch. It is a quality date that happens to double as the only key on the tub that narrows the recall. That is common. Recall notices are often written against dates because the date is what a person can read off the pack, which is why our lot-scoped recalls guide recommends encoding AI 15 alongside the lot and the GTIN. The AB 660 date-label guide covers how those same date words are treated in California.

No GTIN in the member notice

The Costco notice identifies the products by brand, pack size and Costco item number. Items 245554 and 1774521 are retailer SKUs: numbers Costco minted for its own catalogue and which mean nothing on a shelf at another store. The CFIA notice does list a UPC for each product (0 78355 57000 4 for the Honey and 0 78355 47122 6 for the Organic Plain), so a GTIN exists and was published. It just is not the identifier the member notice leads with, and it is not what anything in the fridge would scan to a recall status.

Retailer SKUs are a fair thing to build a scan path around, and shelf-label QR codes are a separate question that this post is not about. The point here is narrower. A retailer item number, a UPC and a printed date all name the same yogurt across the two notices, and only the printed date reaches the specific tub.

The reach gap

The last line of the Costco notice reads: “We ask you to please pass this recall notice along to anyone to whom The Greek Gods Honey Yogurt or The Greek Gods Organic Yogurt Plain may have been given.”

That sentence is a sensible instruction and an honest admission at the same time. A retailer’s purchase records reach the member who paid, for products bought at that retailer. They do not reach the neighbour who was handed a tub, the relative who took two from the box, or whoever the buyer forgot to forward the email to. Identity attached to the transaction stops at the transaction. Identity attached to the item goes wherever the item goes.

A short thought experiment, clearly hypothetical: if each tub carried a Digital Link with the GTIN and the best before date (AI 01 and AI 15), a scan in the fridge could resolve against a recall rule scoped to those codes and answer yes or no in a second, for whoever is holding the tub, whether or not they ever shopped at Costco. It is the same mechanism as the recall that finds every affected customer, and the same argument the lettuce recall made about ink that was already on the bag. A scan that a person chooses to opt into could also remind them before the date on the tub arrives. That is the watching idea, and a recall becomes one more reason for the same scan to speak up.

What a timeline would look like

What happened: the manufacturer issued a recall for 24 codes, the retailer emailed buyers, the regulator published the list, and each person compared a printed code against it, by hand, with the notice open in another window. It worked as well as that model can work.

What could have happened: the same codes are entered once as a rule against two GTINs and 24 AI 15 values. A scan of any recalled tub, anywhere, returns the recall. A scan of a tub dated August 3 returns nothing, because it was never on the list. The 24 codes stay the same. The difference is who has to read them.

Neither Hain nor Costco did anything wrong here. The infrastructure they were handed asks a person to be the matching engine, and the notice is honest about that. The fix is not a better email. It is putting the identifier on the item in a form a scanner can read.

Every fact about the recall in this post comes from the Costco Canada notice and the CFIA notice, checked on September 29, 2026. Recall details can be updated after publication; check the linked sources before relying on them. The hypothetical timeline is illustrative and describes no product currently carrying a Digital Link.