WASHINGTON - Cuisinart is recalling the blades in eight million food processors in the largest kitchen appliance recall in the history of the US product safety commission.
The blades of the food processors are prone to cracking apart, causing small pieces of metal to break off into the food. So far there have been 69 reports of people finding pieces of the blade in their food, including 30 reports of mouth lacerations or tooth injuries, the Washington Post reported.
This week, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Cuisinart announced a voluntary recall on the blades of approximately eight million food processors sold from July 1996 through December 2015, according to the report.
Mr Scott Wolfson, communications director for the CPSC, said in a tweet that it is the largest kitchen appliance recall in the agency's history.
"Largest kitchen appliance recall in @USCPSC history and top 3 for all appliances. Contact @Cuisinart and act now,'' he tweeted.
The recall specifically applies to blades with four rivets that connect the two serrated arcs of stainless steel to a beige plastic center hub.
The affected model numbers begin with CFP-9, CFP-11, DFP-7, DFP-11, DFP-14, DLC-5, DLC-7, DLC-8, DLC-10, DLC-XP, DLC-2007, DLC-2009, DLC-2011, DLC-2014, DLC-3011, DLC-3014, EV-7, EV-10, EV-11, EV-14, KFP-7 and MP-14.
Consumers are asked to immediately stop using the blade and they can contact Cuisinart in the US at 877-339-2534 or go online to recall.cuisinart.com to request a free replacement.
Since the recall was announced, the recall website and Cuisinart's main website have apparently experienced sporadic outages, the Washington Post reported.
The recall of blades in Cuisinart food processors, the workhorse of many US kitchens, could not have come at a worse time for home cooks, with Hanukkah and Christmas less than two weeks away.
Although the company made concerns about the blade public this week, there are indications that Cuisinart had been told about the problem years earlier, New York Times said.
Reports of troubles with the blades were posted on the website where the CPSC takes product safety complaints as early as March 2011, when a cook reported that part of a Cuisinart blade had broken off in a batch of vegetables being processed for soup.
Consumers also posted warnings to other shoppers on websites like Amazon as early as 2012.
New York Times quoted Mr Jason Perlow, a cook who started food blog eGullet in the 1990s, as saying the case is "the foodie version of the Volkswagen diesel scandal."
His wife Rachel said she was frustrated that the company had yet to offer any indication of how long it would take to send a replacement blade.
"Cuisinart just screwed up the holidays for a lot of people," she was quoted as saying in the report.
