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Meatball fans beware: A nationwide recall is underway for a popular brand of frozen meatballs sold at Aldi. The recall is due to the possibility that the product may contain metal fragments, which could cause serious injury if consumed. Heres what you need to know. Whats happened? On Sunday, the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) posted a safety alert about a Class 1 recallthe highest possible designation the agency assigns to recalled products. A Class 1 recall means that there is a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death, according to the agency. The Class 1 recall covers a Bremer-branded ready-to-eat frozen meatball product sold at Aldi stores. The recalled meatballs were produced by Rosina Food Products, Inc., a West Seneca, N.Y., company, which initiated the recall. Approximately 9,462 pounds of the frozen meatball product are being recalled. The issue at hand is that the recalled meatballs may contain metal fragments, which could harm individuals who consume them. What meatball product is being recalled? The recall covers only one meatball product sold under the Bremer brand. That product is: 32-oz. printed poly film bag packages of fully cooked frozen Bremer FAMILY SIZE ITALIAN STYLE MEATBALLS containing about 64 meatballs per package with BEST BY date of 10/30/26 with timestamps between 17:08 through 18:20 printed on the back of the label. According to the recall notice, the recalled product has an establishment number of EST. 4286B inside the USDA mark of inspection. The products were produced on July 30, 2025. Images of the recalled products packaging can be found here. Where were the recalled meatballs sold? According to the FSIS notice, the recalled product was shipped to Aldi supermarket locations nationwide. Has anyone been harmed from eating the recalled meatballs? As of the recall notices posting date, no one is known to have been injured due to the consumption of the recalled product. However, the issue was discovered after a consumer reported to the FSIS that they found metal fragments in the meatballs. What should I do if I have the recalled meatballs? Given that the recalled product has a 15-month shelf life, the FSIS is concerned that consumers may have purchased the meatballs a while ago, yet might still have them in their freezers or refrigerators. If you think you may have purchased the recalled meatballs, you should check your freezers and refrigerators for them. If you have the recalled products, the FSIS says you should not consume them. Instead, you should throw the product away or return it to its place of purchase. Full details about the meatball recall can be found on the FSISs website here.
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E-Commerce
Last October, 35 major donor families, calling their collaborative The Audacious Project, gathered in California and committed $1.03 billion to more than a dozen nonprofits whose proposed projects span multiple years and take on major challenges.The collaborative, housed at TED, announced the winning nonprofits Tuesday, after spending more than a year selecting the groups and helping them sharpen pitches for larger projects than philanthropic funders typically support. It’s not until the donors meet in person that they decide how much to give to each group.Jennifer Loving, the CEO of the San Jose-based nonprofit Destination: Home, said it was “shock and awe,” when they learned the donors had met their funding request to help expand homeless prevention services to multiple U.S. cities.“It’s not for the faint of heart to work on this issue in America,” Loving said, referencing the stigma around poverty. “And so you kind of brace yourself. You never know if people are going to see what you see and it was beautiful. It was really beautiful.”Connie Ballmer, cofounder of Ballmer Group along with her husband Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been a donor since 2021, when she went with one of their sons to learn more about funding around climate change.“Nowhere that I know of can you raise a billion dollars in two days,” she said. “For an organization to raise an amount whether it’s $40, $60, $80 million, I mean, do you know how long that takes them to do that kind of fundraising?”This year, the grantees also include the Arc Institute, a relatively new research group in California, to support its development of a virtual model of a cell that it hopes will help scientists identify treatments for complex diseases like Alzheimer’s.The South Africa-based group, Tiko, also received funding to expand its services for teenage girls, including contraception, HIV treatment and responses to sexual violence. It was the third time Tiko had applied for funding from Audacious, said CEO Serah Joy Malaba, with the hope of scaling their work to reach more girls.In total, 55 major donor families have participated in at least one round of The Audacious Project’s work. The group expands by invitation and the formal criteria that donors be willing to commit at least $10 million to the funding round. Many end up donating more, in part inspired by the commitments that others make in the room.Another donor, Tegan Acton, who cofounded Wildcard Giving along with her husband, Brian Acton, a cofounder of WhatsApp, said she participates because she believes in collective action and values the focus on funding solutions developed by people close to the problems. Acton also said she’s enjoyed seeing how different donors approach their funding decisions.“Some people come and they have a binder printed and they have a thousand tabs with little notes about every project and they’ve marked up the appendices” she said, whereas others, “show up and watch the videos and see what sparks interest.”As part of the application process, finalists record something like a TED Talk that introduces themselves and their project.Loving, from Destination: Home, said the guidance from Audacious and The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm, helped sharpen their plan for scaling their approach to homelessness prevention. The initiative, Right at Home, identifies people and families most at risk of losing their housing and gives them money and support so they don’t. The approach now has won significant public funding in San Jose.“Going through this process was probably one of the most rigorous things we’ve ever done,” Loving said. “I can say with total confidence that it made us smarter.”Loving’s project is a good example of the kind of big change that The Audacious Project seeks to identify. Her group had not aspired to work nationally but identified a solution they think may help other places. Rather than opening new offices or expanding, they will partner with local groups, bring them funding and ask them to participate in research to assess the impact.For the first time this year, some organizations received a second commitment from Audacious donors, including Last Mile Health. Their initial grant in 2018 helped to train many more community health workers in multiple African countries, going from 2,000 to 23,000. This time, they received $20 million to again train more of these front line health workers but also to support an ongoing project to coordinate and mobilize more domestic funding from the countries where they work.“It’s not just a philanthropic investment and then a cliff,” said Lisha McCormick, CEO of Last Mile Health. Instead, the funds will support a reworking of how governments fund their public health systems following major cuts to U.S. foreign aid, which made up a significant portion of some countries’ health budgets.Anna Verghese, executive director of The Audacious Project, said they’d considered making second round grants for a while.“The honest question that we and our donor community had to wrestle with is, what kinds of partners are we if we walk away right when that momentum is building?” she said. Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Thalia Beaty, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
As President Trump has cracked down on all kinds of immigration, tech workers and students have been caught in the crosshairs. In a bid to curb use of the H-1B visaa program that allows employers to hire skilled talent from abroad and is widely used across the tech industryTrump imposed a whopping $100,000 fee on new applications last year. The steep cost of hiring H-1B workers has already had an impact on tech companies and other employers that have come to rely on the visa, leaving many students and aspiring H-1B workers with few options to remain in the country. Some employers have been forced to reevaluate their hiring strategy and have opted to sit out the H-1B lottery this year. For small companies, the fee has made an already challenging, expensive process virtually impossible to navigate. Amid this political climate, the immigration law firm Ellis wants to simplify work visa applications for companiesand workersthrough a tech-enabled platform that uses AI to automate parts of the process, which remains complex and largely paper-based. With a new subscription service, Ellis is now offering employers a tiered option that starts at $2,000 a month, which allows smaller startups with under 50 employees to file unlimited visa applications. That includes most of the common work visa types, from the H-1B to the J-1 student visa or TN visa for workers from Mexico and Canada. Most immigration lawyers still bill by the hour or by case, which means companies can spend thousands of dollars per application just on legal fees. (On an individual basis, Ellis charges anywhere from $2,500 to $12,000 to prepare applications; the H-1B visa, for example, costs $3,000 in legal fees.) By bundling its services, Ellis hopes to encourage employers to sponsor more immigrant workers. If you have a fixed platform fee, like you would with Ellis, your marginal cost of sponsoring a visa actually goes down, which is an incentive we’d like to encourage, says Sampei Omichi, the founder and CEO of Ellis. [Screenshot: Ellis] There are other immigration law firms like Manifest Law that also have a flat fee option, which is more cost-effective for employers, as well as tech platforms like Boundless that provide on-demand legal support for visa applications. Some products are fully automating the visa application process, which means there is limited input from actual immigration attorneys. Ellis is pitching its platform as a more comprehensive solution for companiesand especially tech employersthat are looking for tech-forward legal support and the full services of an immigration law firm. Ellis has managed to bring down the legal costs associated with visa applications in part by employing AI agents where appropriateand only with the oversight of full-time staff attorneys. By automating a lot of the rote and manual work that comes with a more operational type of law, you actually open up the attorneys to do what they do best, which is case strategy, Omichi says. Frankly, most of their job now is acting as a therapist for the folks that are going through the immigration process. [Screenshot: Ellis] For workers seeking visas, Ellis not only offers a smoother, more streamlined application process but also holds the promise that employers might be more inclined to sponsor their visa, even in a hostile environment for immigration. Omichi says the platform aims to provide more transparency into the process, allowing workers to keep tabs on their application through a dashboard and additional elements like shipment tracking. (Applications for the H-1B visa, for example, typically involve hundreds of pages and need to be assembled by hand and shipped out.) In advance of the H-1B lottery opening up next month, the firm also introduced an H-1B lottery odds calculator, to give applicants a sense of how likely they are to get approved for a visa based on their title and location. Perhaps most importantly, Ellis claims to have a 99.4% approval rate on its visa applications; when a visa is denied, the applicant gets a full refund of their legal fees or can file again free of charge. Over the last year, Ellis has filed over 400 applications on behalf of employees at AI startups like Adaptive and Wordware; by the end of 2026, Omichi says the firm is aiming to help 1,000 people secure visas. At a particularly volatile moment, Ellis also hopes to help workers wade through the morass of immigration policy, which can change on a dime under the current administration. We really try to be like an extension of their people team, Omichi says. The use of automation allows Ellis to be more responsive to its clients than other lawyers might be. In addition, the firm invests in education and resources to help both employers and workers who are scrambling to keep up with policy changes, along with giving companies a direct line to Ellis via a dedicated Slack channel. Our job is to kind of simplify a traditionally very, very, very complex process into something a layman can understand, Omichi says. For employers, it means retaining their best talent. And for employees, it’s their livelihood. It’s often the most important thing in their life.If they don’t have stable immigration status, nothing else really matters.
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E-Commerce
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