Consumers are buying less fresh produce this summer, and they are doing it because of what they have read, not because they are confused. Salad-kit purchases, lettuce prices, restaurant traffic and produce shipments all fell after the Cyclospora outbreak went public in July, and the federal response was a slogan. If government and industry want people back in the produce section, the way to do it is to make the count go down, not to tell people how safe the food is.
The New Yorker ran a cartoon (see above without permission) this week that says it better than I can. A couple stands in the produce section with a basket of greens, and one of them tells the other that they have enough groceries that could make them sick right away, and it is time to go pick up some ultra-processed food that will kill them more slowly. The joke lands because everyone standing in front of the bagged salads has had the same thought. That is where thirty years of the safest-food-supply line has gotten us.
What the purchase data shows
The numbers are not anecdotes. Numerator reported that more than 6.5 million American households stopped buying salad mixes and kits during the month that ended July 26, that ten percent of households said they had cut spending on salads and fresh greens, and that more than a quarter said they had stopped buying them altogether. The firm put roughly 280 million dollars a month of produce spending at risk. NielsenIQ had dollar sales of prepackaged salads down 14 percent for the four weeks ended July 25 against the same period a year earlier. Fetch had fresh lettuce down 10 percent, salad mixes down 23 percent and salad kits down 27 percent over two weeks, with the shift going to frozen vegetables. Total Quality Logistics, which handles around 140,000 produce shipments a year, saw shipments drop about 20 percent year over year in the week of July 13 as buyers cancelled orders and some growers dumped product rather than risk it.
The price signal is the sharpest one. Lettuce prices fell 16.4 percent from June to July in the Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonally adjusted data, the largest one-month drop on record. Prices do not fall like that because supply went up. They fall like that because nobody wants it.
Restaurants felt it the same week. Sweetgreen said the outbreak cost it about six percentage points of same-store sales in July and cut its full-year outlook. Chipotle put its hit at around two points in the back half of July even though its lettuce was never implicated. Salad and Go filed for Chapter 11 and closed every location, citing the outbreak on top of its existing problems. Traffic at Chopt fell 24 percent the day after FDA named the outbreak, and Taco Bell, where the traceback began, was still running roughly 20 percent below its normal visit pattern into August.
The Grower Shipper Association said late last month that demand is starting to rebound, and it is honest about why: schools are back in session, and institutional buying is up. That is a calendar effect. The association also said growers remain worried about whether people feel comfortable buying fresh produce. They should be.
What the government said while that was happening
On August 11, with the purchase data already in hand, Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas told CNBC that we have the safest food supply in the world, that Americans should have full confidence in it, and that they should feel confident eating fresh produce including leafy greens. HHS posted the same day that the outbreak was contained and American food was safe. CDC published its weekly surveillance count that same Tuesday: 13,895 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis since May 1 and more than 10,000 more under investigation.
Three weeks later, the outbreak is bigger. As of August 27, CDC and FDA put the lettuce outbreak at 11,458 illnesses in 20 states, 495 hospitalizations and 2 deaths, with illness onsets running from June 14 through August 15. Georgia, Tennessee and Texas were added that day. CDC’s national surveillance count stood at 17,180 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases and 922 hospitalizations as of August 26, against 1,180 cases for the same stretch of 2025. Michigan alone reports 14,510 cases and 356 hospitalizations. FDA moved its inspections upstream to iceberg growers in Mexico in the third week of August, five weeks after the recall.
That is one outbreak. FDA’s active investigations table carries nineteen rows this week: the lettuce, a 431-person Salmonella outbreak in 32 states tied to imported jalapeños that pulled products off shelves at seven national grocery banners, a multi-pathogen alfalfa sprout outbreak Minnesota named in August, an 84-person Salmonella Newport cluster posted August 26 with no food identified, and a string of smaller Cyclospora files with the product column blank. A shopper who reads any of this is not being irrational when she reaches for the frozen peas. She is reading the same pages the Commissioner is.
Why the slogan makes it worse
The safest-food-supply line is not new. Every administration has used it, and I have spent most of my career pointing out what it costs. CDC’s own consumer page still says 48 million Americans get sick from food each year, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The most recent Global Food Security Index put the United States third on food quality and safety, behind Canada and Denmark, and thirteenth overall. Third is a respectable score. It is not first, and the index grades laws on paper, not sick people in hospitals.
The deeper problem is that reassurance without results reads as spin, and consumers price spin into their decisions. When the agency says full confidence on a Tuesday and adds 1,449 people to the outbreak the following Thursday, the lesson people take is not that lettuce is safe. It is that the people telling them lettuce is safe are not the ones to listen to. Trust does not come back because someone in Washington says a sentence. It comes back when the count goes down and stays down, and when the reasons it went down are visible.
What would bring people back
I have watched this happen once. Hamburger nearly killed the fast-food business in 1993. USDA declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994, the industry fought it, lost, and then built the testing, the hold-and-release programs and the supplier requirements that made the rule work. My firm’s hamburger cases went from a steady docket to almost none after 2002. Consumers came back to hamburger because it stopped making them sick, not because anyone told them it was safe. That is the model, and it took a regulator willing to set a standard and an industry willing to meet it.
For produce, the list is short and none of it is new. FDA should implement the FSMA traceability rule in 2028 without another delay and fund the field staff to enforce it, because a traceback that takes two months from first illness to first advisory is the reason a recall could not catch the lettuce before it was eaten. FDA should be inspecting foreign growers and their water, not just the packing plants, before an outbreak and not five weeks after the recall. CDC and FDA should publish one set of numbers on one schedule, so the public is not reading three counts that do not agree. And the agency should stop declaring outbreaks contained on days its own surveillance page is still climbing.
Industry has the bigger job, because it has the product. Growers and processors should test agricultural water and product for the pathogens that actually show up in leafy greens, including the parasite that has now sickened tens of thousands of people twice in this outbreak’s history, and they should publish what they find. The buyers, the restaurant chains and the grocery banners that lost sales this summer, should write those tests into their supplier specifications the way the beef buyers did after 1994, and refuse product from suppliers that will not run them. A company that finds the problem and says so in public earns more trust than any agency statement can give it.
The couple in the cartoon is the market. They are not going to be talked back into the produce aisle. They will walk back in on their own when the shelves stop sending people to the hospital, and government and industry both know exactly what that would take.
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