Updated August 20, 2026. This post first ran on July 23. Since then FDA has released the enforcement file for the July recall, which turns out to cover 236,192 cases and to name the buyers; the Cyclospora outbreak has grown by an order of magnitude; a second Taylor Farms recall has been issued in a different outbreak, from a different pathogen, in a different vegetable; and four recalls I had missed have been added to the roster below. What follows is the whole record as it now stands.

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. 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.

Three of the biggest outbreaks on this page produced no recall, and the biggest recall could not reach the food that made people sick.

Pay particular attention to the gap between the two lists. Three of the largest outbreaks here — 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.

There is now a third category, and it is the one I would not have written in July. A recall can be announced the same day it is initiated, cover a quarter of a million cases of product, and still be incapable of reaching the food that made people sick. That is what the federal enforcement file shows about July 2026, and I will come to it below. A recall is not proof the system worked. Sometimes it is only proof that the shelf life ran out.

The outbreaks, in order, and whether a recall followed.

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 to 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. In August, FDA, CDC and five Mexican agencies conducted an environmental assessment of the Doctor Mora plant and five ranches — not an inspection, and the distinction matters, because it is the reason the document exists at all. It remains the single most-cited record in this company’s history. No recall was issued. Production was suspended; the product already in commerce stayed there.

One line from 2013 has been repeated ever since and it is not accurate. The tests did not come back clean. Roughly 835 samples were negative, but the recycled wash water sample came back inconclusive, because turbidity defeated the filtration method entirely. FDA’s own method literature and the produce industry’s own technical bulletin both say that the 2013 investigation is what broke that method and drove the development of its replacement. The instrument clogged. That is not the same as a negative, and thirteen years later there is still no public result from the sampling program the company described to FDA.

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. I have since obtained the underlying records, and they are worse than the summary suggests. FDA’s own incident report redacts the converged processing facility under exemption (b)(4). The environmental assessment written by Public Health — Seattle and King County names Taylor Farms of Salinas outright, four separate times. CDC’s internal cluster deck contains the distributor receiving log with the lot numbers and harvest regions unredacted. And the national NORS record for the outbreak has an empty field where the King County assessment should have been linked, so the one document that named the company never reached the national file. FDA collected no samples, made no public communication, and closed the investigation in six days.

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 to 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 listing biofilm on cleaned equipment, pre-op checks signed as passing on surfaces the investigator says should have failed, and about a dozen non-food-contact surfaces testing positive for Listeria across twenty months.

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 the unredacted FDA traceback report.

The 2026 Cyclospora outbreak is the largest in American history, and the recall behind it never could have reached the lettuce that caused it.

May 2026 to present — Cyclospora — shredded iceberg lettuce. The one we are living through, and it has grown beyond anything on this page. FDA’s advisory now counts 9,481 illnesses across seventeen states, 398 hospitalizations and two deaths, with the last illness onset on August 3. Those are the laboratory-confirmed cases tied to the recalled product. CDC’s national surveillance page reports 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases of domestically acquired cyclosporiasis since May 1, against 1,180 in the same period of 2025, with at least 11,841 more that may require further investigation. My own fifty-state chart, built from what the states publish about themselves, stands above thirty-one thousand.

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. 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.

Three weeks later FDA’s enforcement system produced the file, and I went and added it up. Event 99453 runs to twenty-one entries and 236,192 cases. That total appears nowhere — not in the company’s announcement, not on FDA’s website, not in any news story — because the system lists the entries and never sums them. The file also spells out the buyers the July notice had reduced to initials: Walmart’s Marketside at 109,476 cases, Taylor Farms’ own label, Cross Valley Farms, Sysco, Subway, Markon, Yum, Jack in the Box and Peak. Subway, at 8,075 cases, is the largest single restaurant chain in the recall and has said nothing publicly about it. Nearly 29 percent of the recalled volume was not iceberg-only — romaine, carrots and red cabbage came out of the same plant and into the same recall, and no federal outbreak page says so. The distribution field also lists Mexico, and I have not been able to find any notice given to Mexican consumers.

Here is the part that changes how this page should be read. Not one of the 236,192 cases carries a use-by date earlier than July 19, 2026 — two days after the recall was announced. CDC’s median illness onset was June 22. Lettuce cut before the end of June had already expired by July 17. It had been eaten. You cannot recall it. The front edge of that recall is not a finding about when contamination began. It is the recall date minus the shelf life. One thing in the file cuts against me and I will say it plainly: the recall initiation date is July 17, the same day it was announced. There is no hidden earlier date, and anyone waiting for one, myself included, should stop waiting.

Marler Clark has filed five complaints out of this outbreak so far, in Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky, against four separate franchise operators and Taco Bell itself, along with the Taylor entities. Four different operators, one lettuce supplier. We have been retained by more than four hundred people in twenty states to investigate how they acquired Cyclospora.

A second Taylor Farms recall this summer came from a different pathogen, a different vegetable and somebody else’s outbreak.

August 2026 — Salmonella Javiana — jalapeño peppers. This one belongs on the page, but not in the list above, and the distinction is the whole point. It is not a Taylor Farms outbreak. CDC and FDA traced it to jalapeños grown in Sinaloa, Mexico and imported by Coast Citrus Distributors, and the count now stands at 431 sick in 32 states with 57 hospitalizations, onsets running from June 19 to August 2. The grower has still not been named. Taylor Farms bought a contaminated ingredient here, the same as every other company downstream of it.

On August 9, Taylor Fresh Foods recalled twenty products made with those peppers — salsas, dips, guacamole, pico de gallo, sandwiches, salads and wraps — distributed to retail distribution centers in twenty-six states with best-if-used-by dates through August 16. The day before, USDA issued a public health alert for eighteen meat and poultry products made with the same jalapeños, fourteen of them out of four Taylor Farms plants. Two federal agencies, two documents, one ingredient.

The fairness point comes first, because it is real. The recalled Taylor Farms items carry best-by dates that begin after the last illness onset in the original reported window. This was a precautionary downstream recall of product built from the same grower’s peppers, not a recall of the food that made anyone sick. Going wide was the right instinct and the company deserves to have that said.

It earns its place here for a different reason. It is the mirror image of the lettuce recall, from the same parent company, six weeks apart. The lettuce recall reached exactly one consumer grocery banner: Marketside. The jalapeño recall reached seven — Hannaford, Kroger, Stop and Shop, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods. Same company, same summer, two completely different levels of public visibility. And inside the jalapeño recall the same problem shows up at the level of the package: only five of the twenty recalled items carry a Taylor Farms name. Eleven carry no brand at all. A shopper holding the tub cannot tell who made it.

Every recall I can verify, sorted by pathogen.

Cyclospora cayetanensis

July 17 and 18, 2026 — shredded iceberg lettuce, iceberg salad, lettuce and romaine blends, and salad mixes with carrots and red cabbage, Taylor Farms de Mexico. Twenty-one entries, 236,192 cases, nine customers, foodservice in 27 states, Marketside consumer bags at Walmart in 15 states, plus foreign distribution to Mexico. Still unclassified in FDA’s system as of this writing.

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.

October 2011 — 3,265 cases of bagged salad blends under the Fresh Selections, H-E-B, Marketside and Taylor Farms labels, Taylor Farms Retail, after a random finished-package spinach test by the Washington State Department of Agriculture; 15 states and Puerto Rico. No illnesses reported.

March 2018 — three-eighths-inch diced yellow onions, Taylor Farms California Foodservice; no FDA or company notice was ever posted, only the downstream grocer’s.

October 17, 2018 — pork carnitas bowls, 276 pounds, Taylor Farms Northwest of Kent, Washington, on recalled fire-roasted diced tomatillos carrying both Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes; Oregon and Washington.

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.

February 2024 — Taylor Farms brand Mexican Style Street Corn Chopped Salad Kit, 329 g, recalled in Canada on Canadian Food Inspection Agency test results; six provinces.

December 2024 — Taylor Farms brand Sweet Kale Chopped Kit, 340 g, recalled in Canada on CFIA test results; six provinces.

August 9, 2026 — twenty salsa, dip, guacamole, pico de gallo, sandwich, salad and wrap products made with recalled Coast Citrus jalapeños, Taylor Fresh Foods; seven retail banners, 26 distribution-center states. A companion USDA public health alert the day before covered eighteen meat and poultry products, fourteen of them from four Taylor Farms establishments.

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.

The quiet recalls are in a database nothing indexes, and I have now run the search I told you to run.

This list is still 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 and in the Recall Enterprise System search, 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 Northwest, 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.

When I wrote that in July it was advice. Since then I have taken it, at least partway. The search under the Doctor Mora entity is what produced Event 99453 and the 236,192 cases, and it took an evening and a spreadsheet export to total by hand. Four of the entries added to the roster above — October 2011, October 2018, and the two Canadian kit recalls in 2024 — came out of the same kind of digging. The search under the United States corporate names has not been run to the bottom, and I will say so rather than let this page imply otherwise. If a separate enforcement event exists under Taylor Farms Retail or Taylor Farms Texas, it is sitting exactly where the jalapeño entry was sitting last month.

The last time an FDA investigator walked into the plant at the center of this outbreak, it was 2019, and there is nothing to read about it.

One more thing belongs on a page about what the public gets to see. FDA has been inside Taylor Farms de Mexico three times in fifteen years — a routine inspection in 2011, the outbreak response in 2013, and an inspection in 2019 that found no violations. The only visit that produced a document anyone can read is the one that happened after 631 people were already infected. A clean inspection produces a database row. A deadly one produces a report. In the first half of 2026, five of the company’s more than 168,000 produce shipments from Mexico were physically examined at the border. None of that is concealment. It is design, and it predates this administration and the last one. But it is why almost everything the public knows about that plant was written after somebody got sick.

The two outbreaks that killed someone are the two where nobody was given a recall notice to read.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The two outbreaks on this page that killed someone before this year — 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.

And now there is a third way for a recall to fail to protect anybody, which is to arrive on time, in public, at enormous scale, and still begin two days after the last of the contaminated food had been eaten. Two people are dead in Michigan. The recall that covered a quarter of a million cases of lettuce could not have reached one bag that made one of them sick. That is not a failure of speed. It is a failure of the whole idea that a recall is how the public gets protected.