FDA cites California rice noodle maker for insects, cockroaches and sanitation lapses

The Food and Drug Administration has told a Southern California noodle maker that ready-to-eat rice noodles produced at both of its Ontario plants were made under insanitary conditions, after inspectors documented dead and live insects near production areas, cockroaches found in a floor drain, and finished noodles sitting for hours at temperatures that allow dangerous bacteria to multiply. The warning letter, addressed to Rama Food Manufacture Corp. and dated September 22, 2026, was posted to the agency's public enforcement database on October 27 and first reported by Food Safety News on Monday.

Rama Food Manufacture Corp. makes fresh rice noodle sheets and dried rice stick products, including banh pho, the flat noodle used in Vietnamese pho, at two facilities on Ontario's east side: one on East Cedar Street and a second on South Parco Avenue. The company has not issued a public statement, and the FDA letter does not report any illnesses tied to the products.

What inspectors found

FDA investigators spent a month, from January 27 through February 26, moving between the two plants. The resulting letter, issued by the agency's Human Foods Program, lays out two separate sets of violations covering temperature control, cleaning practices, pest exclusion and the company's written food-safety planning.

At the East Cedar Street plant, the agency found that cooked noodle sheets were allowed to sit above 70 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as six hours and ten minutes on one occasion in February, well past the window in which spore-forming bacteria such as Bacillus cereus can begin to multiply. Finished product was not consistently checked for temperature before packaging, and some packaged noodles still measured above 70 degrees with visible condensation trapped inside the bag. In one instance, product cooled only 12 degrees over 26 hours. Inspectors also noted that drying racks used in production were discolored and frayed and were not being cleaned or sanitized between uses, and that condensation dripping from overhead vent hoods onto exposed noodle sheets had caused rust-colored staining.

At the South Parco Avenue facility, the violations were more fundamental: the FDA said the company had no food-safety plan at all covering required elements such as a hazard analysis, a recall plan, and monitoring and corrective-action procedures, as required under the FDA's preventive-controls rule, which has applied to most food manufacturers for roughly a decade. The letter states that bacterial pathogens, including Listeria monocytogenes, Bacillus cereus and Clostridium botulinum, had not been identified as hazards the company needed to control for. On January 27, inspectors reported finding what the letter describes as dead and live black-winged insects near rice and noodle production, including on a bag of rice; the affected rice was discarded. A follow-up visit on February 5 turned up two dead cockroaches, one of them in a floor drain near pallets of raw rice. Two days earlier, employees had been observed cleaning soiled equipment in a way that sprayed residue onto food-contact surfaces that had already been cleaned.

The inspection, in brief:

• Two Ontario, California facilities inspected, January 27 to February 26, 2026
• One instance of noodle sheets held above 70°F for 6 hours, 10 minutes
• At least five apparent dead insects and two live insects documented near production on a single day
• Two dead cockroaches found eight days later, including one in a floor drain
• Zero illnesses reported in connection with the findings, according to the FDA letter

Environmental swabs taken during the inspection also turned up two non-pathogenic Listeria species — Listeria grayi at the Cedar Street plant and both L. grayi and Listeria innocua at the Parco Avenue plant. Neither organism causes illness in humans, but the FDA's letter notes that their presence can signal the kind of sanitation gaps that allow the more dangerous species, Listeria monocytogenes, to take hold. Separately, lab testing on a 10-pound sample of fresh banh pho from the Parco Avenue facility measured a water activity of nearly 1.0 and a pH as high as 4.93, levels the agency said are within the range that supports growth of L. monocytogenes if the bacteria were present.

Context: how rice noodles get flagged

Fresh rice noodles occupy an awkward middle ground in U.S. food-safety regulation. They are sold as a ready-to-eat product — something a home cook might toss directly into a bowl of broth or a cold noodle salad without further cooking — yet they are made from a wet rice-flour batter that, once steamed into sheets, has the moisture and near-neutral pH that support bacterial growth if it isn't cooled quickly and kept cold. The FDA's letter explicitly rejects the idea that cooking instructions printed on the package change that risk calculus, noting that consumers "may eat the product without further processing" regardless of what the label suggests.

Rama is not the first rice-noodle producer to draw FDA scrutiny on these grounds. The agency issued a similar warning letter in April to a Houston-area producer for comparable sanitation and process-control gaps, a pattern food-safety specialists attribute to how fragmented and often family-run fresh-noodle manufacturing remains compared with larger, more heavily audited packaged-food categories.

The FDA's letter states plainly that it has "determined that the RTE rice noodle products manufactured in both of your facilities are adulterated," invoking Section 402(a)(4) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — the clause used whenever food is prepared, packed, or held in conditions that could introduce filth or otherwise make it unsafe. That is the formal legal threshold the agency must meet before demanding corrective action from a manufacturer.

Who is affected

Rama's products are sold under its own label and used as an ingredient by other food businesses; the warning letter does not list specific retail store names or a public list of affected lot numbers, and no recall has been announced. That distinction matters: a warning letter is a notice that FDA believes a company is out of compliance with federal law, not, by itself, a recall order, and it does not necessarily mean a specific batch on store shelves is contaminated. Consumers who regularly buy fresh rice noodles — whether from Asian grocery stores, the refrigerated international aisle of a mainstream supermarket, or a local pho restaurant's supplier — are the ones with the most direct exposure to the broader risk the letter describes, since fresh noodles of this type are typically sold without a kill step before the point of sale.

Restaurants and grocers that buy wholesale from Rama are also affected, since the FDA's findings raise questions about the safety controls applied before the product reaches a kitchen or a shelf. The company's response to its FDA Form 483 inspection report, submitted March 17, included a hazard analysis and an environmental monitoring plan, according to the warning letter, suggesting at least some corrective work was already underway before the formal warning letter was made public.

Rama Food Manufacture Corp. has not issued a statement responding to the letter, and the FDA's public announcement contains no comment from company officials. Food Safety News, the trade publication that first surfaced the letter, and eFoodAlert, a food-safety newsletter that tracks FDA and USDA enforcement actions, both flagged the letter as part of their routine monitoring of the agency's enforcement database rather than in response to any new illness report.

What's next

Under standard FDA procedure, companies that receive a warning letter must respond in writing within 15 working days, describing the specific steps taken to correct the violations and documenting that the fixes are working. If more time is needed, the company must explain why and give a timeline; if it disputes the findings, it must lay out its reasoning. The letter warns that failing to adequately address the violations could lead to further legal action, including product seizure or a court injunction barring further production.

The FDA has not indicated whether it plans further inspections of the Ontario facilities, and the agency's public database does not yet show a closeout letter, which the FDA typically issues once it has confirmed a company has fixed the problems identified. Shoppers who want to reduce their own risk with any fresh, refrigerated noodle product can follow the CDC's standard guidance for perishable, ready-to-eat items: keep the refrigerator at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or below, use the product by the date on the package, and when in doubt, cook it through rather than eating it cold.