Quality surprises from imported goods don’t stop at the port gate. In 2025, US importers are still discovering that what finally reaches their own warehouses, retailers, and customers is mis-specified, short-weighted, mislabeled, or unsafe, and too often these problems are only found after products are deep inside the domestic supply chain.
Where Problems Are Really Found
Most imported shipments are not fully unpacked and inspected at the port. Border agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the FDA, USDA, and CPSC use risk-based screening and selectively examine a minority of containers at terminals or Customs Examination Stations. Once a shipment is cleared and released, it typically moves to the importer’s warehouse, a third-party logistics facility, or a distribution center, where the importer or a third-party quality firm performs more detailed checks—or in many cases only limited spot checks—before goods flow onward to retailers and end-customers. Many quality issues are first discovered in the importer’s own facility, at a retailer’s distribution center, or on the shelf, not at the port, by which time the importer already owns the inventory and must bear the cost of rework, returns, discounts, or destruction.
A Persistent, Measurable Problem
Recent regulatory work shows these issues are real and ongoing. In a 2022 FDA assignment on imported frozen seafood, inspectors sampled shrimp, squid, and other products to look for economically motivated adulteration through short weighting, including excess ice glaze counted as product weight. Out of 28 imported frozen seafood samples, 10—more than one-third—were violative, with short weighting between 2.3 percent and 9.9 percent of the declared net weight; those lots were refused entry and the firms involved were placed on Import Alert so future shipments can be detained without physical examination until they can demonstrate compliance.
Beyond seafood, FDA and USDA data show recurring safety and labeling problems in imported fruits, vegetables, spices, and other foods, many of which are identified only after distribution through recalls and outbreak investigations. Studies of manufacturing and supply chains consistently find that the cost of poor quality—including scrap, rework, returns, inspections, and failures caught late—often runs from about 5 percent to well over 10 percent of sales. Weak supplier oversight and limited upstream controls push defect-related costs significantly higher than in firms that invest in better visibility and governance.
From Warehouse to Consumer
Dockside and warehouse checks still miss a lot. FDA’s recalls and outbreak pages show that many unsafe or misbranded food products, including imported ones, are discovered only after they have already reached retailers and consumers, sometimes following reports of illness. Consumer advocates regularly highlight high-risk recalled foods that people have already purchased and eaten by the time warnings are issued. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission tracks thousands of recalls for hazardous consumer products each year, many of them imported, and estimates that deaths, injuries, and property damage from unsafe consumer products cost the United States more than a trillion dollars annually. Analyses of unsafe and unregulated imported consumer goods show how often problems are revealed only in consumers’ homes or through post-market surveillance.
What This Means for Importers’ P&L
For a mid-sized importer moving tens of millions of dollars of goods each year, even a small percentage of shipments that prove unfit or fraudulent once they are in domestic circulation creates large, recurring losses. These appear as direct write-offs for unusable, mislabeled, or short-weighted product; indirect costs for extra labor, storage, inspections, claim handling, and expedited replacements; and downstream impact from delayed orders, customer complaints, and recalls when bad product reaches consumers. In sectors such as apparel and consumer goods, firms with weaker supplier oversight can see defect-related costs exceed those of better-managed peers by double-digit percentages. In food and other highly regulated categories, a single problematic lot can trigger tracing, communication, and reputation costs that quickly exceed the shipment’s value.
Why Traditional Controls Fall Short
The structural weakness is that most controls are back-loaded. Border agencies sample selectively, and importers often rely on limited checks at their own facilities, leaving large blind spots between factory, port, warehouse, and consumer. Suppliers may quietly dilute quality, short-weight loads, or change components to protect their margins, while subtle substitutions and mislabeling slip through until a batch fails testing or consumers complain. With sparse data and sporadic audits, importers are effectively betting their margins and brands on late discovery.
The Case for Digital, End-to-End QA
Instead of relying on sporadic checks at the border or in a warehouse corner, the real opportunity is to infuse AI—machine learning, inferential logic, and automation—directly into the critical tracking events in a supply chain. When quality and integrity checks are embedded at these CTEs (for example, during packing, loading, receiving, and key handoffs), every movement of product becomes a chance to confirm “this is what we ordered, in the condition we expect.”
AI-assisted image and video inspections, combined with item- or batch-level identifiers such as QR codes or digital IDs, can continuously verify products from origin to end customer and capture precise evidence when something goes wrong. Just as important, every actor in the chain—producers, consolidators, carriers, importers, distributors, and even retailers—can contribute data at their own critical events, creating a shared, time-stamped record of what was seen, measured, and accepted at each step.
With that kind of AI-infused, multi-actor visibility, importers can cut inspection effort, shorten detection cycles from weeks to hours, and reduce repeat failures by acting on hard data rather than anecdotes. Preventing even a fraction of today’s quality- and fraud-related losses is enough to make this kind of end-to-end quality assurance pay for itself, while making supply chains more predictable and products demonstrably safer for consumers.
If you’d like to explore traceability in more depth, the links below are a good place to start. They include regulatory updates, recall data, and practical guides on import quality, safety, and supply chain risk.
- Video: Toy recalls explained using CPSC data (DANGER TOYS)
- FDA – Recalls, Market Withdrawals, and Safety Alerts
- FDA – Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks
- Overview of U.S. customs inspections for imports
- Types of U.S. customs inspections and holds
- FDA – Import process for regulated products
- FDA – Import basics
- Freightos – Product quality management for importers
- USDA ERS – Patterns in FDA food import refusals
- Food Safety News – Import refusals for fruits and vegetables
- CRS – U.S. food and agricultural imports: safeguards and issues
- Food Safety News – Salmonella in U.S. food imports
- Cost of Poor Quality – definition and components
- McKinsey – Manufacturing quality today (PDF)
- McKinsey – Higher quality output, lower cost of quality
- The true cost of quality defects and poor supplier management
- FoodSafety.gov – Recalls and outbreaks
- Consumer Reports – Risky recalled foods you should know about
- News summary of recent CPSC product recalls
- CPSC – Recalls and product safety warnings
- CPSC – Consumer Product Safety Commission home page
- CPSC – Strategic Plan 2023–2026 (PDF)
- USCC – Unsafe and unregulated Chinese consumer goods (PDF)
- CPSC – Most common violations for imports
- Practical tips for controlling quality issues when importing from China
- How to avoid quality fade with clothing manufacturers in China
- “The Scourge of Quality Fade” – commentary on gradual quality erosion