On January 15, 2025, the FDA and CDC closed their investigation for November 2024. E. coli O157:H7 occurs in romaine lettuce. 89 people are sick in 15 states. Of those, 36 were hospitalized. Seven suffered from hemolytic uremic syndrome, a clinical manifestation of a child’s kidneys failing. One person died. The agency recorded the vehicle as romaine lettuce from a general supplier and did not disclose anything further. No processor. There are no growers. There is no ranch. There aren’t many. None of the public advisories issued for all similar romaine outbreaks since 2010 have been written on this issue.
When NBC News released the FDA’s own internal report in April of that year, the agency named companies when evidence supported them and had actionable advice to give to consumers, and explained that by the time investigators identified the likely cause of the outbreak, the outbreak was already over and there was nothing left for anyone to do. The reasoning is I reported and reported again. Since then, and The agency never backed down.
The name has always existed. This was in a hand-written backtracking summary behind a gray box that the FDA claimed was a trade secret. Our epidemiologists discovered a thread running through clients with matching whole genome sequencing of each other, and its name became known to the public in April 2025. federal court documents Instead of going through the government press release: Through processor Taylor Farms of California in Salinas and grower Anthony Costa & Sons in Soledad, lettuce is sent back to the same ranch and the same lot at four of the five service points. It took me almost a year to figure out the edits after that. You can read the unedited backtracking summary for yourself.And I already wrote about it at length. What was written on the page and what was hidden in the box?. Taylor Farms denied this at the time. I deny it now: Our position is that our product was not the source and our own raw and finished product testing showed nothing. Sound familiar?
Here is my battle with no actionable advice for consumers. The audience is defined by one shopper holding a bag of lettuce, and that person was not actually helpful because they ate romaine in November. But it wasn’t just shoppers who needed the name.
Cisco needed it. US Foods needed it, and Performance Food Group, Markon, Walmart, Yum Brands, Subway and Jack in the Box were all buyers with supplier decisions and resulting contract terms. The director of food services at a hospital in Keene, New Hampshire needed this. The state epidemiologist was required to determine which vendor names belonged on the questionnaire. We needed lawmakers to have traceability rules in their calendars. And Taylor Farms needed it. Because there is a difference between companies that answer questions publicly and companies that don’t.
Obvious objections deserve to be confronted head on. Taylor Farms was nominated publicly eight weeks ago. Sliced onion outbreak in October 2024 It passed through McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, sickening 104 people in 14 states, hospitalizing 34, inoculating four of them with HUS and killing one, and the buying continued. truth. But the outbreak was attributed to an onion problem at a plant in Colorado Springs, and the company handled it by communicating the recall to foodservice customers through direct notifications, with no announcement to consumers. Form 483 It’s something almost no one reads. One outbreak is an incident. Two deadly outbreaks occurred eight weeks apart in two different factories and two different products. The second name is a name that turns events into patterns, and the second name is a name that the FDA does not release to the public.
Company-level records do something for regulators that product-level records do not. This makes the following question clear: What else does this company operate and where does it operate? FDA has already submitted a response. In 2013, the same family’s factory in Doctor Mora, Guanajuato Cyclospore An epidemic that has infected 631 people in 25 states; FDA’s own environmental assessment It’s a good idea to find out if it’s possible. Cyclospore It is reasonably likely to be hazardous in your growing region, and if so, reevaluate your salad mix cleaning steps. The agency allowed the plant to return to work, in part based on the company’s promise to test the waters. Now, 13 years later, not a single published result can be found.. Disclosure alone in January 2025 would not have been enough to detect the parasite in Mexico. If you’re looking into the rest of Taylor Farms, you’ll probably have questions that need to be answered in writing by someone.
Parliament is another place that would have been given that name. Rosa Delauro They demanded answers about the 2013 outbreak. While it was still operating, and in 2018, the same question was asked again. And she’s the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the FDA. In November 2025, Congress directed the agency not to implement food traceability rules before July 20, 2028. The compliance date for this rule, January 20, 2026, arrived four months before the first illness of the outbreak we are currently experiencing. I can’t say that disclosure 10 months ago would have changed a single vote. I would have loved to have seen someone defend that rider against an unnamed, deadly outbreak of romaine.
I would not argue that the silence of January 2025 caused the outbreak of May 2026. Different plants, different countries, different products, different organisms with different biology, and I’ve spent 30 years telling other people not to get too close to causality. What I’m trying to say is this. All the mechanisms that might have caught this problem earlier—buyers asking harder questions before signing, regulators reviewing the company’s remaining facilities, traceability rules in practice, state health departments already having the vendor’s name in their head when the interviews began—were weaker on May 13, 2026, than they would have been if the FDA had done the mundane thing it chose not to do in January 2025. That’s my opinion. I hold on to that and I think the record supports that.
See where that takes us. CDC confirms 1,947 cases in 9 statesAnd all of these instances are defined as eating at Taco Bell. We aggregate self-reported information from all 50 states and Bottom is 18,209.Michigan surpasses 10,000 cases this morning160 people were hospitalized. New Hampshire State Department of Health There are 17 lettuce recalls from Taylor Farms. It’s on the salad bar in a hospital cafeteria in Keene, which is still the only state in the country to name a place. I’m against all that. The company’s history of outbreaks and recalls dating back to 2009. And please tell me the ledger is not important.
There’s work to be done on this and it’s been sitting at the FDA since February. Apply to stop food poisoning citizen petition On February 4, it asked the agency to adopt a policy to publicly disclose the names of all companies involved in foodborne illness outbreaks, regardless of whether they have a recall attached. The legal argument is neat. Trade secret laws protect sales figures and proprietary processes, not the factual identity, of companies that sell food to the public, and the DC Circuit held that the company name itself is not commercial information. If the agency argues that the statute should be read in its own way, the petition requests disclosure under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act or by amending its own regulations at 21 CFR 20.91. None of this requires rulemaking. The commissioner could approve it via memorandum this week. I said the June petition was correct. I’ll tell you again today.
Now read the reasons for the petition itself for the file the agency closed in January 2025. If you make it public, even people who are sick and don’t report it will be counted. People holding the product are instructed not to eat it. And that gives companies whose names are in the papers a reason to double down on work. None of these three things will happen in 2025. Because there was no name to give them. Petitions also make production points better than I’ve ever managed. Because fresh produce is perishable, produce outbreaks often end without a recall, so a policy of only disclosing names when there is a recall will have the greatest impact on products that cause the most outbreaks. That’s not an unfortunate side effect. This is the whole mechanism of the gray box and why leafy greens keep showing up without names.
The primary example in the petition is the November 2024 Romaine outbreak, and the child described in the petition is my client. Colton George is 9 years old, has been in the hospital for 18 days, has had 9 consecutive days of dialysis, 5 intermittent dialysis sessions, 5 blood transfusions, and is still under the care of a nephrologist. His father spent months trying to find out the name of the company that sold his son lettuce, and finally wrote about it myselfBecause no one in the company would tell him. The father doesn’t have to do his backtracking. One of the things I added to the petition is this: It talks about consumer-facing companies, which we haven’t had in this outbreak. Lettuce moved from growers to processors to distributors to restaurants and onto banquet plates without a brand anywhere. Disclosure must also be communicated to processors and growers. Otherwise, the occurrence will continue to end up as a gray box for the simple reason that there is no one’s logo on the bag.
Transparency is not a courtesy that the government extends to consumers standing in the produce aisle when it is convenient. That’s a record. It’s what buyers read before they sign, what regulators read before they schedule an inspection, what lawmakers read before they vote on riders, and what juries read years later when sick people finally have their day. The FDA’s rule is that it names companies that consumers can take action on. The November 2024 Romaine outbreak is proof that the rules were written for the wrong audience. Eighty-nine people became ill, one died, and seven children suffered kidney damage. The only reason I know who did it is because I filed a lawsuit and got the government to turn over the deleted pages. Since 1993 I’ve been saying that’s a terrible way to run a food safety system. It still is.
Lastly, let me just say one thing for the record. Below are all Taylor Farms outbreaks with public federal or state documents attached. Read the list and see what’s missing. The November 2024 romaine outbreak covered throughout this post does not exist. There is no CDC investigation page. There is no FDA outbreak page. There is no public notice of any kind. It exists in the public record because we filed the lawsuit and posted the unredacted PDF on this blog. That’s what the gray box actually does. The names of the seasons are not hidden. It takes the entire outbreak off the books permanently and 89 people disappear with it.
2026, CyclosporeIceberg lettuce. FDA Investigations Page and CDC Investigation Updates.
2024, E. coli O157:H7, onions sold at McDonald’s. CDC Investigation Updates and FDA Outbreak Investigation.
2021, E. coli O121:H19, romaine lettuce. NORS Report and Outbreak Summary Slide.
2015, E. coli O157:H7, Costco Rotisserie Chicken Salad. Last update from CDC. Taylor Farms has recalled a mixture of chopped celery and onions in its salads, but the FDA recall notice is no longer available online, but it has never been officially considered a common source.
2013, CyclosporeSalad mix in a bag. MMWR notes from the field, CDC’s 2013 Outbreak Investigation Page, FDA Environmental Assessmentand Nebraska and Iowa Area Survey.
2009, salmonella Typhimurium, shredded lettuce. A contemporary report from the Oregonianfurthermore backtracking and Oregon Health Alert — both are still edited 17 years later.
