Walmart knew about explosion risk in water bottles for 7 years before recall

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It sounded like Walmart was moving quickly.

The retailer said last month the public should immediately stop using its Ozark Trail 64-ounce stainless-steel water bottles because the plastic lid “can forcefully eject,” which led to three injuries, including to two people who said they were partially blinded by flying bottle caps. Walmart said it voluntarily decided to stop selling the product and was offering $15 refunds to remove the 850,000 bottles already on the market, according to a July 10 notice posted on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s website.

“The health and safety of our customers is always a top priority,” the company said in a statement that traveled widely across social media.

But this was not a new problem, according to a review of CPSC documents and lawsuits.

Walmart had known about the danger since 2018. That detail wasn’t mentioned in the recall notice. The company and regulator confirmed the information following Post inquiries.

In fact, all three injuries noted in the CPSC warning had occurred within months of one another seven years earlier, starting in March 2018 when a couple outside Atlanta tried to share some homemade beef and pepper soup stored in an Ozark Trail bottle. A subsequent lawsuit alleged that after the lid seemed stuck the man held the bottle while the woman twisted the screw-on cap.

“It literally exploded. The cap blasted her eyeball,” the couple’s attorney, Ben Locklar, said in an interview. The case was eventually settled.

The decision to recall a product is rarely a straightforward calculation. There often are behind-the-scenes negotiations and liability concerns, as shown in other recalls and litigation. Some companies resist. Some balk at the proposed remedy. There can be disagreements over whether the problem is a defective product or consumer misuse.

Companies face reputational risks whatever they decide, and recalls can land in unexpected ways. Research has shown that markets and consumers can punish companies both for being too aggressive or not aggressive enough in addressing dangerous products. One path looks like panic. The other looks like indifference.

“I do suspect that there’s a measure of risk tolerance that’s being discussed” when a company makes a recall decision, said Kevin Mayo, a business professor at Washington State University who has studied how companies make recalls.

Most companies want to avoid ending up in a position like Peloton, the home exercise company that in 2021 faced fierce consumer backlash when it was revealed the company had been fighting the CPSC’s request to recall its Tread+ treadmills after the product was tied to one child’s death and other injuries.

Only about 300 or so consumer product recalls are announced each year. That is in part because the CPSC, the nation’s product safety regulator, lacks the authority to force a recall in most cases without a court order. It usually needs a company’s cooperation.

“A company can think about burying it under the rug and think, if it blows up, we’ll take that hit,” Mayo said.

The public is unlikely to know a company delayed a recall “unless someone does the digging,” he said.

Walmart said it wasn’t trying to hide or delay anything.

Ozark Trail is a Walmart-owned camping and outdoors brand. Walmart began selling the Ozark Trail 64-ounce insulated bottle in 2017. The bottle featured a wide mouth and carried twice the amount of liquid as a 7-Eleven Big Gulp. It was a low-cost entry into the burgeoning reusable bottle category, which includes brands such as Yeti, Hydro Flask and Stanley.

The retailer said it promptly reported the three injury incidents to the CPSC in 2018, as required by law.

Walmart could have decided to announce a recall then, but the CPSC didn’t ask for one, according to a Walmart official familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the company’s internal processes.

The CPSC declined to comment directly on what actions it took in response to Walmart’s notifications over the years.

A statement from an agency spokesperson at first blamed the lack of a recall in 2018, when the problems first appeared, on President Joe Biden’s administration when the “CPSC pursued other agenda priorities while declined to secure recalls for product with known defects.” But in 2018 the president was Donald Trump and the head of the CPSC was a Republican. Today, Trump is again president, and the new CPSC head is also a Republican. A follow-up CPSC statement said the agency “cannot speak to decisions made” or delays under previous administrations.

Walmart said it believed the problem was not with the bottle’s design but with “consumer misuse of the product,” the Walmart official said. “Our position is that when the water bottle is used to hold water, it is safe.”

The woman injured in Georgia used the bottle to store hot soup.

The next incident, in August 2018, involved a man in Washington state who had left hard apple cider inside the bottle for several days. As he struggled to twist off the lid, “it was projected with tremendous force,” according to a subsequent lawsuit.

“The impact ruptured his left eyeball,” the suit said.

Two months later, a woman outside Boston tried to open her bottle filled with mango juice and was blasted in the face by the lid, according to another lawsuit. The complaint alleged she suffered “massive damage” to her jaw and face.

Walmart struck confidential settlements in the three court cases. At least one of the cases involved a protective order restricting what details could be shared. Attorneys for two of the cases did not respond to requests for comment. Locklar, the attorney for the Georgia case, said he was limited in what he could discuss.

His case was settled before his team could definitively identify the cause of the Ozark Trail incidents, he said, although he believed a small pressure-release valve or different threading on the bottle’s lid could have prevented the injuries.

“I had no idea that these things can become like bombs,” he said.

Two years after the injuries, in 2020, Walmart began to include new caution inserts with the bottles. They added warnings against using the bottles to store any liquid besides water, such as milk or fermenting beverages, which “may cause pressure buildup and lead to lid failure and spills” and cause injuries, according to the label.

“It seemed to work,” the Walmart official said. The company said it received just one report of an exploding bottle after that, and no one was injured. That was in 2024. Walmart reported the new incident to the CPSC.

This time the agency did ask Walmart to remove the product.

That is what led to the July recall.

“The health and safety of our customers is always a top priority and (we) maintain that this product is of a conventional design and safe when used for water, as intended,” Walmart spokeswoman Annie Patterson said in a statement.