Update: Taylor Farms, 2009 to 2026: The Outbreaks, and the Recalls That Did and Did Not Follow | Marler Blog

Skip to content

Search

Close

Enter Search Terms

Search

Marler Blog

Providing Insight on Food Poisoning Outbreaks & Litigation

Marler Blog

Providing Insight on Food Poisoning Outbreaks & Litigation

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...