The cyclospora outbreak is creating a PR headache for food businesses

0:08Hello and welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast, a show that covers the ways the retail industry is changing and modernizing. I'm senior reporter Gabby Barco. If you're like me, you've spent a good chunk of your time during your last grocery run staring at the green section. That's after weeks of hearing about the ongoing cyclospora outbreak that's infecting lettuce supply across the country. The incident is creating a wave of confusion for shoppers, retailers, and food service businesses. But this is not a traditional product recall. In recent weeks, the parasite outbreak has brands like Sweetgreen and Taco Bell scrambling to assure customers their produce supply is safe.

0:51But how much responsibility do companies actually have to communicate these health concerns? Today, we're diving into the new rules of retail safety, the PR challenges caused by food outbreaks, and the difficulty of rebuilding consumer trust in the long run. With us today is Helena Bademiller-Evich. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Food Fix, a new online publication about food policy in Washington and beyond. Helena, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. All right. So today we're going to be talking about a topic that's, to me, taken sort of the food media world by storm, which is this cyclospora outbreak.

1:37And there's been a lot of reporting about it, particularly with lettuce supply. But now it seems to have spread to other produce. But I do think it's interesting in the sense that we don't really have clear communications as consumers of what it is that retailers or brands or producers want us to do as far as what we should purchase. I mean, I get it. I don't think retailers are going to start to fear monger around their products. I understand that. But as somebody who's covered outbreaks and recalls for a long time, I would love to just start by hearing high level what you think makes this specific incident so unique and what it could mean just for future outbreaks.

2:24Well, it's a really good question and it is really unique. I have covered foodborne illness outbreaks for more than 15 years, and this is easily the one that I'm getting the most questions about from friends and family. I'm getting questions from people I haven't heard from in 10 years, like texting me, messaging me on Instagram going, what are you eating? What am I supposed to do? Because it is so confusing. I think there's a number of reasons why the situation is so confusing. I think the first is that we saw all of these headlines about thousands of cyclospora cases before we knew anything about a source, before we had a recall.

3:02We eventually did get a recall for iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms to Mexico. That iceberg lettuce went to 27 states. It was mostly food service, but there was some retail, some market-side iceberg products that were sold at Walmart. But even with that recall, that only covers one of the outbreaks that's being investigated right now. the real challenge here is we're having multiple cyclospora outbreaks at the same time. So FDA said they're investigating at least six outbreaks at the same time. And so we're seeing all these headlines about cyclospora being this horrible problem, exploding diarrhea.

3:45We've had more than 300 hospitalizations. We're probably somewhere around 13 ,000 cases nationally right now. So it's bad, but you just don't get that much info as a consumer about like what you're supposed to do. Okay. There's this one iceberg that's been recalled. Don't eat that. But we're learning washing doesn't really help because the parasites, essentially eggs, like cling to the produce and they resist chlorine, they resist water. And so even the the advice you get as a consumer, it doesn't really give you much, uh, comfort. You know, you're just sort of at your, we're all standing in the salad section going, what am I, should I buy this?

4:29Should I not? Like, so it's confusing. Um, this is a really hard thing also to investigate because you can get sick two weeks, up to two weeks after you ate, um, contaminated product. So like, I mean, even you're a food person, I don't think you could like very reliably list every ingredient you've consumed in the last two weeks. And so it presents a lot of challenges for investigators. It's really confusing for consumers. And then we can get into like, I think there's been some real missteps by Taylor Farms and also the government in terms of just like how they're communicating this. And so it's a really confusing situation, no question.

5:07And this is also just a disaster. It's a food safety and consumer, I think, confidence disaster. Yeah, for sure. So I guess on the food service side, which seems to have sort of the bulk of the impact, we've had names like Taco Bell making headlines, but then also some fast casual chains. You had Cava, Chop, Chipotle, Panera Bread, Sweet Green, which we'll talk about in a minute. just experiencing like drops in foot traffic in the double digits. And that's a really big deal considering that a lot of these companies were already struggling, you know, due to things like hybrid work or work from home, you know, they rely so much on office workers.

5:47So like, having this fear in the air and people being like, well, I'm not going to get a sweet green salad today, because I don't want to be sick in a couple weeks, is obviously put a damper on things. So I'm kind of curious to hear from you, like if we're talking about like, you know, from a media or marketing perspective, how some of these companies have handled this. Cause of course there were fielding questions. What have been some examples that stood out to you? Yeah. A few of my readers of my newsletter have sent me, um, like pictures of different retail or they, or they'll see something on social and they'll share it with me.

6:21So we've had a couple of examples come in where retailers are putting some sort of signage. So I've been looking out at different grocery stores and I have not yet seen signage in the salad section. But every time I go to the store, I'm looking to see if they've added something. But I know that there was, I think King Soopers had a sign up that someone posted on threads and it read, you know, it basically in the bagged salad section, right? So you're seeing lots of Taylor Farms branded product there. And Taylor Farms has said that none of their branded product for retail is part of this, but you could understand as a consumer going, oh, I hear Taylor Farms.

7:02I'm maybe not going to buy that, right? And so there was a signage posted at King Soopers, which said, Taylor Farms products sold at Kroger family of companies, which King Soopers is part of, are domestically sourced and have been cleared by the FDA and CDC as safe from the cyclospora a parasite. Well, that language is probably a bit strong. FDA and CDC are not clearing products. They're not saying, oh, this product is not involved. They're still actively investigating multiple clusters of illness. So I think lawyers would take a lot of issue with that. I'm not a lawyer, but they would take a lot of issue with the certainty that's being described there.

7:43But I think retailers could certainly say the products that we have out here right now are not part of the recall that you may have read about. You can say that. That's a fact you can convey. You can say, I think that they're saying it's domestically sourced. Makes sense. I think consumers are probably looking for more leafy greens from California or anywhere else in the U.S. just knowing that this was an issue with Mexico and is likely a sanitation issue. well we haven't fully learned what happened but um and then there was also another example where harris teeter had a different type of sign where they wrote taylor farms products sold at harris teeter are domestically sourced and have not been identified by the fda as being associated with the current cyclospora outbreak i think that signage probably makes a little bit more sense to just like state what you know which is that the products we're selling again are not part of this outbreak Um, but I, and there it's also, by the way, like a lot of sale signs on these bag things, this shows a picture where they're running them$2 off, which is about a 50 % discount, uh, for a lot of these products.

8:50So I understand why retailers are trying to say something like they, you know, they, they, I think, understand that consumers are showing up to this section and they have questions, especially about products they maybe, um, are used to buying every week. uh what's i think difficult is that there are still products being investigated that haven't been named and we don't know what they are so we've seen some reports from certain states where they're like well we think it's cilantro okay well cilantro from where right like what it hasn't been recalled has it already been eaten and so it's a tough time i think it's a tough thing to communicate because there are so many questions and we're not getting super regular updates from CDC and FDA.

9:40I think they could be doing a much better job of like really naming or like giving us more information. They're not having a lot of briefings. I think we've had like what one media briefing and they took like three questions. And it was only after there was massive confusion because folks may remember, what is this now? Like a week or two ago, FDA had a false positive of cyclospora test. They had tested Taylor lettuce coming in from Mexico. It was iceberg lettuce that wasn't part of the recall, right? So if this had been indeed positive, this would have meant that more lettuce needed to be recalled.

10:21It would have meant that we didn't have our hands around the recall. It ended up being a false positive. And what that did was sow a lot of confusion because media then wrote headlines, oh, it's not Taylor Farms, but that's not what the false positive meant, right? The false positive was a bad mistake for the feds to have made, but it didn't change any of the underlying epidemiological evidence that pointed the finger at Taylor Farms de Mexico's iceberg lettuce as the source for at least the outbreak that CDC and FDA are investigating across nine states. So there's a cyclospora surge in 41 states right now.

11:02But this particular issue with Taylor Farms de Mexico is really across nine states. And that's where you see Taco Bell being named because that was like the first outlet or retail place that was named. So it's very confusing. It's very, very confusing. I understand why people are confused. And unfortunately, cyclospora is an increasing food safety issue in the U.S. And I'm worried we're going to see this every summer. We have been seeing it every summer, just not quite as bad as it is right now. Yeah. You know, a lot of the media reports or reading have, you know, pointed out that this parasite or cyclospora is typically associated with like international travel, like eating something on vacation and then coming back and reporting it versus, you know, this sort of widespread like grocery and restaurant induced outbreak.

11:56And so do you think that's contributing to some of the confusion on like from sort of like a PR perspective on how some companies are handling it? I think generally American companies just don't know that much about this parasite. Like, again, I've covered food safety a long time. I have had to read up on this parasite. but I didn't know really anything. I mean, I wrote about cyclospora in the newsletter maybe two or three years ago as this emerging issue that we were seeing, but it is not something I've covered normally. I used to write for Food Safety News back in the day. I covered foodborne illness outbreaks on a weekly basis.

12:37I never covered cyclospora. It just wasn't something we saw. And over the last about 10 years, we've seen kind of every summer between May and August, we've seen a surge of cases. Sometimes we identify a source like after the fact or like one summer it was cilantro and it was hundreds of cases, I believe, in that case. I think the worst summer we've seen was 4 ,000 cases over the whole summer. But there are, in each of these cases, likely multiple sources. So it is probably true that many of these, if not most of these cases are coming from like imported produce. So it's not that people are going abroad and getting, you know, not getting this while they're traveling, but it's actually that the produce is coming to the U.S.

13:26and may have had contaminated water or other sanitation problems because cyclosporates really gross, but it lives or it's transmitted via human feces, not animal feces. We usually worry about animal feces. So like E. coli, salmonella. These other ones are usually from, these are usually bacteria that you get from cattle intrusion or some other wildlife bringing the pathogen into the fields. And this is human feces. So that tells you, again, we don't know exactly what happened here, that tells you sanitation or waste management or something like that has gone wrong, likely contaminated water, chlorine doesn't kill this bug like it does for others.

14:17And so that's a real challenge here, but it's imported produce that's kind of bringing the problem more into the U.S. And also we are starting to see a couple of cases where cyclospora is actually being found in domestic produce. And I think that should keep everyone up, right? That this needs to be taken them seriously as a food safety challenge for the U.S., both for imported product, but also potentially increasingly for domestic product. And that's a big challenge. I think the industry, produce industry, retailers, whoever's sourcing this, and FDA, CDC, agricultural researchers, everyone needs to get on this, right?

15:02This could spiral into an annual disaster where consumers are like, oh, I'm not going to eat fresh produce in the summer. That's not good. I'm seeing, I don't know if you're on threads or like, there are so many people on threads who are just like, I'm not eating fresh produce right now. They're literally only eating cooked stuff. And you can get great nutrition from cooked food, but is that really what we're going to accept here? Where does that leave sweet grain, right? What are these other products? We're getting the message from the government, right? To eat real food, to eat more fresh produce.

15:38And so that keeps me up at night that this is really the opportunity for the industry at every level, for government, for ag researchers to really focus on this, do whatever research is needed, get a better understanding so that we can get our arms around this. So this is not an annual thing. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it doesn't seem like the cases are dropping, right? It's almost like a rapid fire. They're just, they're just going up. Michigan just reported another almost thousand cases yesterday to sort, you know, in a day they're, they're doing, they're reporting anyway from 500 to a thousand new cases every day over the weekend, easily adding another thousand cases.

16:26And some of that probably is that Michigan has strong public health surveillance and they're capturing a high number of the cases, whereas other states may not be capturing all of them. But that is a disaster. Just to give folks a sense, the largest foodborne illness outbreak in the last 30 years in terms of number of cases directly associated would be something like 2 ,000 cases. And that would be a bad outbreak, like salmonella, eggs nationwide, bad, real, real bad. And just in Michigan, we're seeing 10 ,000 cases. And again, they're not all tied to one product probably, right? Like we're having multiple things going on, but that just gives you a sense of how bad this is.

17:12This is really, really bad. The only like silver lining here is that this isn't particularly dangerous. We've seen 300 hospitalizations, thankfully no deaths. I'm not aware that there's been any deaths in the U.S. ever associated with cyclosporium, so that's good. But it's miserable. We're talking weeks, weeks of misery and risk of dehydration and just horrible symptoms, watery diarrhea, explosive diarrhea, cramping, pain, exhaustion, no appetite. Really, really rough. So we don't want this to be our new normal. And as I understand, like we're still in the thick of it. So I do hesitate to ask, but like, where do you go from here if you're sourcing produce right now?

18:00Let's say whether you are a retailer or like a restaurant owner or whatnot, like what would you say? Where could you start? Because of course, you know, finding the source and all that, that's coming up from a sort of a higher up maybe supply chain, you know, people in charge of that. But like, yeah, where do you start? I guess, if you do want to. And can you ever be sure? Well, fresh produce is always going to have some level of risk, right? It's not a sterile product. It's grown off and outside, even in a greenhouse. There's always something that can go wrong. Even with products that are not fresh produce, but fresh produce always carries some level of risk.

18:42And I think for most people that the benefits are going to much outweigh the risks, right? But everyone has to make a different calculation on that. If you're immunocompromised, if you're under the age of two, if you're an elderly person, you know, or everyone has to make a different calculation. So just with that said, I do think that right now everyone should be taking a harder look at like anything coming from central Mexico or around this area. Like, is there something going on with water contamination or sanitation generally? Is there an infrastructure issue? I think these are all questions that make a lot of sense right now.

19:23It's something that we do not yet have our arms around in terms of like, we just don't know what happened, what went wrong here. So in a situation where a company can source the same product that was like grown in California versus grown in Central Mexico during this time of year, I could see making the argument that maybe you choose California just because you have a little bit more certainty about the safety of the water and the general sanitation. Now, that doesn't mean that California won't have issues. We've seen plenty of leafy green outbreaks tied to California, but I do think that this particular issue is much, much less likely, much more less likely to happen from domestic produce.

20:06And so that may not prove to be true in five years, but I think right now we understand that. So I've heard some rumblings that there's already kind of like a move away from particularly iceberg lettuce from this area right now, generally, like even if it's not from Taylor and Taylor has shut down a lot of their operation in Mexico, especially out of this, this plant that, that was implicated. And so there's going to be a lot more questions, I think about that product that I write. But the unfortunate thing is, is like, we could be having issues with like five different things right now. And we don't know what the other four are.

20:44And that's really tough. I'm curious in your experience, you know, from past foodborne outbreaks, the one that comes to mind for me is that Chipotle E. coli one that was, I think, around 2015-ish. I mean, obviously, Chipotle has come back from that, right? But it's been 10 years. And so I do wonder, like, Like, if you are a Taylor Farms, it's like, does that name continue to be associated with Cyclospora for, I don't know, months, years, whatever it might be? And, like, what do you think these brands can do, I guess, from a communication perspective that could help other than just, you know, gradually regain that trust by being, like, transparent, et cetera?

21:30Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I don't know how Taylor Farms' brand is going to fare after this. I will say. Or any of them. Yeah, or any of them. But I've written in the newsletter that Taylor Farms, the way they handled the false positive test, the way they issued a statement saying FDA apologized to us. And they really made it sound like they had been wrongly implicated. Like they used kind of the false positive to send the perception that, oh, we've been cleared, which was not the case. And it really confused people. It really muddied the water. And I think whether it was intentional or not, that will be studied for a long time as what not to do during one of these outbreaks.

22:12Because it made consumers more angry. They were like, wait a minute. So now you're like not taking responsibility? Like once the dust settled and sort of the facts came out. And so I think that will go down as a, like, I really think this is going to be studied as a case study and like what not to do. And it will probably do longer term brand damage because of how they handled this. um generally though i think the bigger issue is like lettuce demand going down because even went back in like 2006 we had a really bad e.coli outbreak tied to spinach like fresh spinach and spinach sales didn't rebound from that fully for like a decade or something it took a long long time we see the similar things happen when there's like a peanut butter issue or something there's just a subset of consumers who just will like they'll just ditch it yeah they'll just be I'm not doing that anymore.

23:08And so there is a real risk here with just produce consumption and lettuce consumption, the demand softening for that. And we just saw a poll from YouGov and CBS, I think it came out a couple of days ago, and it found that 40 % of Americans were saying they were eating less fresh produce or lettuce because of this. And so I think that's the longer term concern is that this actually, this actually hurts produce demand. Um, at a time when, you know, we're trying to be, we're trying to get Americans to eat healthier. And so that's an unfortunate like long-term thing, but, um, Taylor Farns is going to have a lot to deal with.

23:50And then any other, you know, if any other, um, brands get pulled into this, you know, it's, It is not an easy thing to recover from. But, you know, you have to be straightforward with consumers. I think that's like kind of 101. And Taco Bell is getting a lot more kudos, I think, because they took swifter action. They took action like even before there was a recall announced. And you see a lot of consumers like kind of rewarding them with good vibes online. Now, I don't know if that translates to them rebounding financially, right? But they do seem to be getting a little bit more credit for how they've handled things.

24:34Yeah, I feel like these are very much make or break moments, especially because social media is so involved in these now. Well, by the way, social media had pinned this on Taylor like eight or nine days before the recall. Yeah, which is why I think everybody has to make these very careful calculated moves, right, when you're making announcements. It'll be interesting to see what, yeah, the sales, whether there's been hits. Maybe we'll start to see them in reportings or retail earnings in the next couple of months. But yeah, it's not good that Americans are pulling back on leafy greens or fresh produce, especially because it's summer and, you know, obviously salad, you know, vegetable season, whatnot.

25:21And so, yeah. I do think this is still a really low probability thing, right? So, like, I'm still eating fresh produce. I'm still eating greens. You know, I am not eating iceberg lettuce from Mexico. I am also thinking more about domestic sourcing. So like if you're looking at cilantro and you have two options, one's from local and one's Mexican, you might think, okay, I'm going to pick the local one, right? Like I think there's like things you can do. Rinse. We've heard like farmers from markets getting a little bit of boost. Rinse your stuff really aggressively, but that's like good practice for anything at any time of year, even not during this time.

25:59Even knowing that it's not going to like fully remove, you know, if there is cyclospora, you can peel the outside. So if you get a head of lettuce, you can take the outer layers off. That could reduce your risk. You can chop your own salad. But overall, I'm still eating fresh produce. I'm still giving fresh produce to my kids. You have to also look at where you are. I'm in Washington State right now. I'm usually in DC, but we're in Washington State with my family. And we're not having a surge of cyclospora here. So taking a look at your local, your state and local information and advisories, everyone can look at that.

26:35I think the folks in Michigan who are giving up leafy greens, you know, I understand that. That makes sense. You're reporting a thousand new cases a day. They're pointing to leafy greens. They don't feel like they have their arms around it fully. And so, you know, I think everyone has to kind of look at their information locally, but it's just totally giving up fresh produce. I mean, unless you're prepared to do that every summer that we have cyclospora, like, yikes, right? Like, it's not good. I am kind of curious about the seasonality because you said summer, you've sort of alluded to it a bunch and it does seem to be associated with summer.

27:15Is there a reason for that? And should we expect it for the X amount of summers to come? So I don't think we fully know, but I think the theory is that just because it's slightly warmer, that it's a little bit more hospitable to the parasite. and I'm not sure why in the U.S. we are particularly seeing a surge. We really are seeing a surge basically from May to August every summer and we have for the last 10 years. But it's been a few hundred cases and then a few hundred more cases. And then, like I mentioned, our worst summer had been 4 ,000 cases total across the whole summer. This right now is obviously many, many more times worse than that.

28:00and we don't fully know why. And that makes me concerned that there might be some other environmental factor here. So there is some concern, we don't know, but there's some concern that like warming temperatures generally or like climate change shifting where different pathogens and parasites thrive, like that that could be changing the landscape here. We just don't fully know. But seeing how this is a seasonal issue now and seems to be getting worse, that's what makes me concerned. It's that we don't have our arms around it. There's still a lot we don't know about this parasite in the US. And it feels like a lot needs to change.

28:41I'm not sure what that is to make sure this doesn't happen again next year. And I'm just concerned that because the industry hasn't kind of nipped this in the bud. Like we've been having these searches since 2016. We haven't nipped this in a bud. That makes me just concerned that we may be in for some more summers like this. I really hope not, but this is bad. Yeah. Okay, sorry. That was like, great note to end it on. I'm like, sorry. No, no, it's okay. I was just literally about to be like on that note. Okay, well, Helena, Thank you so much for joining us. I feel like I learned so much because, again, there's just so many conflicting reports online, especially and even as journalists, sometimes it can be very overwhelming to navigate this.