YSK: Taylor Farms Iceberg Lettuce is sold under many different names

[u/hardasjello]

Why YSK, Taylor Farms sells their iceberg lettuce to many food stores using different names and you don’t need explosive diarrhea.

Here are some of the different names and stores that sell Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce

Earthbound - Taylor Farms

365 - Whole Foods

Simple Truth - Kroger/Fred Meyer

O-Organics and Signature Select brands - Safeway/Carrs

Greenwise - Publix

Simply Nature - Aldi

Marketside - Walmart

Good and Gather - Target

H.E.B Store brand

Trader Joe’s store brand

[u/cogman10]

Which is exactly why the USDA and FDA exist and should be funded to do this job. It's ridiculous it's taken this long to track the source and this is ultimately a regulatory and executive branch failure.

The FDA, in particular, probably should be split into 2 organizations anyways. There should be a food safety organization like the USDA (in fact, it wouldn't be horrible if the USDA took on the FDA's role in general food safety).

[u/EFCF → u/cogman10]

Gee it's almost like cutting CDC funding for food safety monitoring (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/well/cdc-foodnet.html) and delaying a "food traceability" rule the FDA wanted to implement from now, until 2028 (https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-final-rule-requirements-additional-traceability-records-certain-foods), were bad ideas!

More people need to be aware of all the ways - there are MANY - the current administration are screwing us in our every day lives.

[u/GitEmSteveDave → u/cogman10]

It's ridiculous it's taken this long to track the source and this is ultimately a regulatory and executive branch failure.

Politics aside, is it? This thing has a hella long incubation period and by the time the sickness starts and the investigation begins, the products themselves have been consumed and/or thrown out and entire other crops of that product have grown and been harvested.

And trying to remember everything you ate for the past 2+ weeks is not that easy. The other day I forgot I had eaten a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger, with lettuce, until I found the receipt in my pocket because I had grabbed it before a stressful medical procedure, so that kind of pushed everything I did out of my thoughts.

[u/stevez_86 → u/GitEmSteveDave]

They are supposed to be able to pull products from the shelves or inventory of restaurants and be able to quickly identify where it was grown, where it was washed and processed, stored for distribution, and got to where it ended up on the shelf.

Yes, politics aside the system was set up to quickly identify what the infectious body is, what it was on, and where it same from.

The problem is they cannot do that because the "chain of custody" was broken because they were not tracking where product they washed was sent to. Did Dole buy some of the lettuce they washed and processed but didn't want under the Taylor Farms label? Did Aldi buy it up to be wrapped in their packaging? They should be able to quickly identify who they processed the product for so they could distribute and sell.

[u/cogman10 → u/GitEmSteveDave]

Politics aside, is it?

Yes, it actually is.

The CDC has a wastewater monitoring program specifically for these sorts of long-tail food borne illnesses. This would have shown up there before anyone reports being sick. And since this is the type of food which doesn't survive being cooked, that cuts down on what needs to be sampled to fresh produce eaten raw.

Once that happened, the CDC can take action in the area to start sampling produce and restaurants looking for the disease. Once the source is found, they can start doing chain analysis to figure out exactly where in the food chain the disease is being introduced.

They do not have to rely on people keeping track of what they are eating, just on the disease load in the poop.

But even if we rule out early detection, Taco bell themselves identified the source of infection. There really is no reason why the CDC couldn't have immediately used that identification to follow the food chain.

[u/waitwuh → u/GitEmSteveDave]

I have work experience in supply chain and manufacturing quality control. There’s a lot of points that we try to catch these problems, and it ideally shouldn’t get to the store shelves in the first place, but if something does, manufacturers would start pulling samples and testing them all and then tracing by lot back through to find the source of the contamination.

I used to be a person to do this in the system! For about 5 years. You could give me the lot code of a product someone identified with a problem, and I could look up exactly where and when it was made, the factory (products can be made at multiple locations), the line, the time, and even who was working and ran it, and then trace back the raw ingredients to their incoming orders from suppliers, if necessary. Then I would start expanding out to identify any other batches that were also at risk due to some shared common factor, and send my list on to investigators.

But the product I was tracing had never made it to consumers, at worst just the warehouse, and more often was just “out of spec” for something far less serious, like a label that branding or marketing didn’t like, or that should have been changed per some contract or something, or one time because of a regulation update for nutritional labels for how olive oil was supposed to be identified.

As far as biological contamination, factory lines are supposed to be regularly cleaned between runs, there’s different levels of cleaning and frequency, and they even get swabbed for analysis, too, and every batch coming off had samples sent to a laboratory to check and would be on a QC hold in the system. This would block shipping that batch to a consumer. It would be released after results came back showing no bacteria or fungus or whatever. I remember listeria was a big thing in a lot of the milk products.

The tricky thing with cyclospora as I understand it is that it’s not as easy to test for. Things like listeria are a bacteria they can grow on a petri dish, cyclosporia is a parasite that won’t replicate outside the human gut.