Every time Taylor Farms turns up at the center of an outbreak, the company says the same thing — this is an isolated event, our branded products are not involved, we acted quickly. So let us put the record in one place. What follows is every Taylor Farms outbreak I can verify from public sources, with the pathogen, the dates, the number of people sickened, and the product. I know these personally, because I represented the people and families impacted.
Then every recall I can verify, sorted by pathogen. Read them together and a pattern shows up that no single press release can explain away.
Pay particular attention to the gap between the two lists. Three of the largest outbreaks on this page — 2013, November 2024, and the 2021 romaine cluster — produced no recall at all. Two more produced recalls that went only to foodservice customers by direct notice, with nothing posted for the public to read.
Outbreaks with Recalls or Not
2009 — Salmonella Typhimurium — shredded lettuce. Shredded lettuce sickened 145 people in the western United States and at least 12 more in Canada. The product was shredded lettuce sold into fast-food and foodservice accounts, and the illnesses pointed at the processing step rather than at any one restaurant. No recall. This is the outbreak nobody remembers, four years ahead of everything else on this list.
June–August 2013 — Cyclospora — bagged salad mix. 631 people in 25 states were sickened. Iowa and Nebraska health officials concluded that the restaurant cases in their states traced to a salad mix produced by Taylor Farms de Mexico, served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster. The Texas cases, a large share of the national total, were never conclusively tied to the same product. FDA inspected the Guanajuato plant that August and produced the environmental assessment that remains the single most-cited document in this company’s history. No recall was issued. Production was suspended; the product already in commerce stayed there.
November 2015 — E. coli O157:H7 — celery and onion diced blend. Nineteen people in seven states were infected, five were hospitalized, two developed hemolytic uremic syndrome and one required a kidney transplant. The vehicle was Costco’s rotisserie chicken salad; the ingredient was the celery and onion diced blend from Taylor Farms Pacific in Tracy, California. Montana’s public health laboratory got a presumptive positive off a retail sample. Taylor Farms Pacific recalled the blend and many other celery-containing products on November 26, 2015, and the recall grew past 155,000 items across Costco, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Target, Safeway, 7-Eleven and Starbucks. FDA’s follow-up analysis could not confirm the organism, and the company has called it a false alarm ever since. Nineteen people were still sick.
November 2021 — E. coli O121:H19 — romaine lettuce. A small cluster, and a telling one. Two Washington cases reported eating romaine at Panera Bread and two Minnesota cases reported eating romaine at Chipotle; the lettuce traced back to Taylor Farms. No recall, and no CDC advisory. The traceback landed and the public was never told.
May 2023 — Cyclospora — Taco del Gnar, Ridgway, Colorado. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and Ouray County Public Health investigated Cyclospora infections among patrons of a single restaurant, with fresh produce implicated and the supply chain running back to Taylor Farms. The public entry does not carry a case count. No recall. A documented single-restaurant Cyclospora cluster is rare, and this one sits three years ahead of the current outbreak with the same parasite and the same supplier.
October–December 2024 — E. coli O157:H7 — slivered yellow onions. One hundred four people in fourteen states, 34 hospitalized, four with hemolytic uremic syndrome, and one dead in Colorado. Sixty-three of 75 people interviewed — 84 percent — reported a menu item containing fresh slivered onions, and FDA’s traceback pointed at the onions served on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. Taylor Farms initiated a voluntary recall of yellow onions on October 22, 2024 and notified its foodservice customers directly. There was no consumer-facing recall notice. FDA closed the investigation without ever recovering the outbreak strain from an onion, and the Colorado Springs plant drew a Form 483.
November 2024 — E. coli O157:H7 — romaine lettuce. Eighty-nine people in fifteen states, with onsets from November 4 to November 30, 2024. Thirty-six were hospitalized, seven developed HUS, and one person died. CDC and FDA closed the investigation in January 2025 without telling the public which company grew the lettuce. Our own epidemiologist found the common thread among clients who were whole-genome-sequencing matches to one another, and the name came out through federal court filings in April 2025. No recall. Fifty of the 89 were in Missouri, most of them from salads catered at a St. Louis high school. Taylor Farms denies every bit of it. In a statement to The Packer, the company said “Taylor Farms product was not the source of the referenced 2024 E. coli outbreak,” maintaining that its raw and finished product testing showed nothing and that tying its products to these illnesses was unfair to the families who got sick. Set that against what the traceback actually found: a single processor sourcing romaine from a single grower, with the lettuce at four of the five points of service running back to the same ranch and the same lot – See FDA Report
May–July 2026 — Cyclospora — shredded iceberg lettuce. The one we are living through. CDC has confirmed 4,173 cases since May 1 and is working to confirm roughly 7,400 more; Michigan alone reported 7,171 cases as of July 22. FDA’s traceback converged on a single supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, which provided the shredded iceberg lettuce used at Taco Bell locations where sick people ate in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled all central-Mexico iceberg lettuce on July 17, 2026; the shredded product had gone into 27 states between June 29 and July 16, and Marketside-brand consumer bags were pulled from Walmart stores in 15 states — which is worth remembering every time you hear that only restaurants were affected.
Recalls by Pathogen
Cyclospora cayetanensis
July 17–18, 2026 — shredded iceberg lettuce and iceberg salad, Taylor Farms de Mexico; foodservice in 27 states, Marketside consumer bags at Walmart in 15 states.
E. coli O157:H7
November 26, 2015 — celery and onion diced blend and other celery-containing products, Taylor Farms Pacific; expanded past 155,000 items.
October 22, 2024 — whole peeled, jumbo peeled and diced yellow onions; foodservice customers notified directly, no public notice.
Salmonella
May 2, 2011 — ready-to-eat salad kits containing recalled Six L’s grape tomatoes, Taylor Farms Pacific; about 22,000 pounds on the USDA side.
March 2018 — 3/8-inch diced yellow onions, Taylor Farms California Foodservice; no FDA or company notice was ever posted, only the downstream grocer’s.
August 2020 — diced onions, salads, stir fry and mirepoix, Taylor Farms Texas; Marketside and Taylor Farms brands at Walmart and Kroger in 11 states.
2021 — Taylor Farms brand Maple Bourbon Chopped Kit, 315 g, recalled in Canada; Class 2. A branded consumer salad kit.
Listeria monocytogenes
October 2013 — broccoli salad kits, 5,084 pounds, on account of dressing packets under FDA recall; a companion Taylor Farms action pulled about 5,000 units of broccoli salad across 23 states.
February 11, 2017 — chicken and pork salad products, 6,630 pounds, from the Dallas and Tracy plants.
October 23, 2021 — Taylor Farms Mushroom Stir Fry, 9 oz., Kroger stores in eight states.
February 9, 2024 — Marketside Bacon Ranch Crunch Salad Kit, on the expanded Rizo-López Foods cheese recall.
Undeclared allergens and misbranding
October 24, 2014 — walnuts, Signature Café Broccoli Kale Salad with Chicken, 377 pounds.
May 26, 2016 — wheat and sesame, Wawa Thai style chicken mango salad, 151 pounds.
August 7, 2017 — milk, Taylor Farms Creamy Homestyle Coleslaw Kits, 293 cases.
October 28, 2017 — fish (anchovies), salads with chicken, Taylor Farms Florida, 732 pounds.
August 29, 2018 — egg and wheat, homestyle beef and pork meatloaf, Taylor Farms Illinois, 75 pounds.
May 14, 2019 — Caesar salad with chicken, Taylor Farms Texas, 1,079 pounds.
May 27, 2022 — wheat and egg, Trader Joe’s Lemony Arugula Basil Salad Kit, Taylor Farms Retail.
March 13, 2024 — wheat, Kroger apple walnut with chicken salad bowls, Taylor Farms Pacific, 19,976 pounds.
August 26, 2025 — sesame and soy, Taylor Farms Honey Balsamic Salad Kit, 25 states.
Processing defect
August 9, 2019 — breaded chicken products that may have been undercooked, Taylor Farms Illinois, 342 pounds.
A Note on What Is Missing
This list is not complete, and I want to be plain about why. FDA’s public recall page carries only the announcements a company chooses to make public. The quiet ones — the direct-to-customer foodservice recalls, the low-classification actions nobody writes a press release about — are recorded instead in FDA’s Enforcement Report Database, which is searchable by firm and covers 2004 to the present. Anyone doing this work should run that search under every corporate name the company files under: Taylor Farms Retail, Taylor Farms Pacific, Taylor Farms Texas, Taylor Farms California Foodservice, Taylor Farms Illinois, Taylor Farms Florida, Taylor Farms Tennessee, Taylor Farms Maryland, Taylor Farms de Mexico, and Taylor Fresh Foods. Search one string and you will miss most of them. Meat and poultry recalls sit with USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service instead, which is why so many of the entries above point there.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The two outbreaks on this page that killed someone — the onions in October 2024 and the romaine in November 2024 — are also the two where the public was never given a recall notice to read. In the first, customers were told and consumers were not. In the second, nobody was told at all until we filed suit.