For decades, food safety policy has largely operated on a simple principle: break the rules, and/or put consumers at risk and there will be consequences. 

Consequences matter. Enforcement is essential. This is not an argument that we need less oversight or regulation. It’s a proposal for oversight that promotes the prevention-based outcomes we seek. 

There is a fundamental weakness in a system built primarily around penalties: most of the economic rewards still come from producing food faster and cheaper, not necessarily from investing more aggressively in preventing the next outbreak. 

What if we changed that? 

Imagine a food safety “fast pass” — a system in which companies that can demonstrate exceptional, sustained risk management receive tangible trade and economic advantages. 

For domestic growers, that might mean preferential access to federal market development programs, reduced crop insurance costs, grants for infrastructure, such as shared agricultural water monitoring systems, tax incentives for food safety infrastructure investment, or other benefits for operations demonstrating robust risk management, meaningful environmental surveillance, strong traceability and transparent food safety data. 

For imported foods, imagine a verified “green lane.” Importers demonstrating years of strong preventive controls through on-going data sharing based on risks in their region, traceability, transparency and regulatory performance that could receive expedited entry, allow for AI-based monitoring for data anomalies, unified traceability elements and fewer routine inspections that may not drive risk down. This system would allow the regulators to concentrate resources on suppliers and regions presenting data gaps, and potentially greater risk. 

That isn’t deregulation. 

It is risk-based regulation. 

And importantly, the metric cannot simply be “no positives” or “no outbreaks.” That would create incentives to test less, investigate less and report less. We need to stop the passive incentives that drive the exact opposite behavior and outcome that we want. 

The safest operation isn’t necessarily the one that never finds a problem. It may be the one that looks hard enough to find problems early, designs the ongoing monitoring system to alert it when risks are increasing, and demonstrates the risk mitigations it implements— ultimately showing that it knows what to do when it finds them. 

Food safety investments are expensive. Better water systems cost money. More sophisticated surveillance costs money. Traceability costs money. Data infrastructure costs money. 

Yet much of the financial benefit of those investments accrues to the broader food system and public health, while the individual grower or importer bears the cost. This increasing cost burden also comes while our economic system generally rewards those with the cheapest prices. That’s the opposite market incentive we are looking for. 

We shouldn’t eliminate the stick— but maybe food safety needs a much better carrot. 

If we want companies to invest in prevention before the outbreak, perhaps exceptional food safety performance should become more than a regulatory expectation. It needs to become a differentiator and market advantage, ensuring that those who put the effort into prevention are continually rewarded for doing so.  

When a foodborne illness outbreak occurs, public communication is not separate from the response. It is part of the response.

Clear, timely information can help consumers avoid a specific risk and help the supply chain remove affected food. Vague, incomplete or inconsistent information can do the opposite: confuse consumers, obscure the actual risk and reduce confidence in foods that were never implicated. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration faces a difficult task. Outbreak investigations develop quickly; early investigative evidence does not always lead to a single food source, and waiting for certainty can leave people exposed. Thus, the communication challenge is apparent. The answer, though, is not to communicate less. It is to communicate with greater precision, context, coordination and transparency about uncertainty.

The 2026 Cyclospora outbreak illustrates why this matters. On July 4, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported that no grower, supplier or produce type had been identified. Yet its advisory listed six types of produce associated with previous Cyclospora outbreaks and recommended that restaurants and consumers alter how they purchased or prepared them. Those foods included salad mixes, cilantro, basil, raspberries, snow peas and green onions. The state was appropriately trying to protect consumers during a rapidly growing outbreak. But listing commodities from earlier outbreaks, without evidence that they were involved in the current event, created a predictable risk: the public and news media could interpret historical examples as a list of suspects. This was a missed opportunity for FDA to provide a visible, coordinating federal voice that distinguished three things: what investigators knew, what they were evaluating and what consumers could do without avoiding broad categories of nutritious food.

On July 16, FDA and CDC announced that a subset of illnesses was linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants and that traceback converged on a supplier in Mexico. FDA identified Taylor Farms de Mexico the following day, along with the voluntary removal and recall. That specificity was essential. It gave consumers, retailers and restaurants an actionable target and clarified that the evidence did not implicate all lettuce, all leafy greens or all fresh produce. During that period, FDA could have maintained a central national update explaining that there were several additional Cyclospora clusters under investigation, that no single produce item explained all reported illnesses and that domestic leafy greens had not been implicated by the available evidence. FDA did not need to disclose confidential traceback information or overstate preliminary findings. It needed to explain the boundaries of the evidence it had at hand.

North Carolina offered another example of why federal coordination matters. On July 17, state officials reported that parsley, cilantro and lettuce were commonly reported among cases there, while expressly noting that the North Carolina increase did not appear connected to the Taco Bell outbreak and that exposure reports did not prove causation. Those distinctions were important, but consumers following national headlines could easily combine separate state announcements into one expanding list of risky produce. FDA should serve as the authoritative hub that clearly separates confirmed outbreaks, suspected clusters, unrelated investigations and background surveillance.

The handling of a product sample on July 18 and 19 showed another communication vulnerability. FDA announced a positive Cyclospora result from lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, then reported the next day that laboratory review found the result was a false positive. FDA appropriately corrected the record and explained that the epidemiological and traceback evidence still supported the recall. However, preliminary laboratory findings with significant public and commercial consequences should undergo a defined verification step before public release whenever consumer protection does not require immediate disclosure. When a correction is necessary, it should be as prominent and widely distributed as the original announcement—not merely edited into a webpage. FDA’s current outbreak page provides a useful update history, but the goal should be to prevent unverified findings from shaping the initial news cycle. These are not isolated concerns. Western Growers’ analysis of the 2022 hepatitis A outbreak linked to imported strawberries found an estimated $125 million in short-term wholesale revenue losses for California growers, even though domestic strawberries were not recalled. The initial public health advisory did not clearly identify the product as imported. That detail mattered not only to growers. When consumers cannot tell which product is affected, they may avoid an entire category. Reduced fruit and vegetable consumption is itself a public health concern.

FDA can improve outbreak communication through a practical framework.

First, every advisory should state, in plain language, what is confirmed, what is reasonably suspected, what remains unknown and what would change the agency’s assessment. FDA already says that a public health advisory should provide specific, actionable steps. The same standard should apply to descriptions of risk and uncertainty.

Second, as soon as evidence permits, FDA should identify the commodity, product form, brand or supplier, country and growing region of origin, distribution channel and relevant dates. If those details are unknown, the advisory should say so explicitly and explain what investigators are doing to obtain them.

Third, FDA should coordinate messaging with CDC and state health and agriculture agencies before major announcements. A short joint risk-communication call can reduce contradictory wording without delaying urgent warnings. Federal updates should also clearly distinguish concurrent clusters. Federal updates should also clearly distinguish concurrent clusters by providing information on why these clusters are considered distinct, what food sources are reasonably being considered, including country of origin, and how each cluster’s case count contributes to the total case count.

Fourth, FDA should build correction discipline into its outbreak process. Material changes should be time-stamped, preserved in an update history, pushed through the same media and subscriber channels as the original statement and accompanied by a concise explanation of why the evidence changed. Finally, communication should continue after the immediate hazard has passed. FDA should publish timely outbreak investigation and root-cause reports that translate findings into preventive actions for growers, importers, retailers and public health agencies. A collaborative approach should also extend to outbreak communication protocols, using pre-established contacts with commodity experts who can help the agency describe seasonal production, product forms and supply-chain distinctions accurately.

FDA has made meaningful progress. Its current outbreak pages provide case counts, product-distribution information, recall details and dated updates. The agency has also emphasized actionable advice as the basis for public health advisories. The next step is to make transparency, uncertainty, origin and correction equally consistent features of every communication. Consumers deserve prompt warnings when food may be unsafe. They also deserve to know what food is not implicated, how strong the evidence is and when the facts change. Better communication will not eliminate outbreaks, but it will help protect people without creating avoidable confusion, undermining confidence in fresh produce or discouraging the healthy eating that public health agencies work to promote.

Western Growers President and CEO Dave Puglia was featured in The New York Times this weekend as it examined the ongoing Cyclospora outbreak and its impact on the produce industry.

While California-grown lettuce has not been implicated as the source of the outbreak, growers across the region have experienced significant declines in demand, with millions of heads of healthy produce being plowed back into the ground. Puglia said that the impact on produce sales has been close to 30 percent, greater than the impact of other recent foodborne illness outbreaks. Puglia also emphasized the industry’s commitment to food safety and the need to continue building consumer confidence.

“There is a need to open the doors wider and give consumers greater visibility into the food safety practices and standards we have developed.”

Puglia’s comments highlight the important role Western Growers plays in making sure our growers’ voices are heard and that the conversation around food safety remains grounded in facts, science and a commitment to protecting consumers.

Read the New York Times article featuring Dave Puglia here.

Western Growers Experts in the News

Additionally, several other Western Growers experts were featured in recent coverage. You can read those stories below:

From Salmonella Eggs to Diarrhea Lettuce, Why This Has Been a Sick Hot American Summer featuring De Ann Davis, SVP, Science.

USDA cyclospora research projects shelved amid funding cuts and relocations featuring Joelle Mosso, AVP, Science Programs.

The Partnership for Food Traceability (PFT) will host an in-person workshop Sept. 9-10, 2026, in Washington, D.C., focused on lot-level tracking and preparation for FSMA 204.

The interactive workshop will bring together food supply chain stakeholders to explore implementation challenges and practical solutions related to capturing, maintaining and sharing traceability data. Discussions will also address interoperability, reducing data exchange friction and approaches that support both regulatory requirements and business needs.

The workshop will be held at Leavitt Partners’ offices, beginning at 11:30 a.m. on Sept. 9 and concluding by 2 p.m. on Sept. 10. FDA participation and remarks are anticipated throughout the event.

Registration is complimentary, but space is limited. Register by Aug. 31.

Learn more here.

Product recalls and safety failures frequently harm businesses beyond the company responsible for the problem. Here’s an example: the wave of children’s-product recalls in 2007 helped prompt the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act’s broadly applicable testing and certification requirements, imposing compliance costs across the children’s-products industry. Empirical studies also find that automobile recalls can reduce supplier firm value and sales of nonrecalled models of the same brand, while seafood recalls temporarily reduce purchases of unrecalled brands of the affected species.

These effects are generally described as economic “category spillover” or “product-harm spillover.”  For the U.S. economy, fresh produce, however, may represent the most important example of “product-harm” spillover because domestic growers can simultaneously experience an immediate collapse in demand, destruction of perishable crops, reduced near-term planting schedules and continuing food-safety costs, even when an outbreak is traced to an imported product.

The 2022 hepatitis A outbreak associated with strawberries imported from Mexico provides a clear quantifiable example. Although California strawberries were neither implicated nor recalled, in a Western Growers report, we estimate that California growers lost approximately $125 million in wholesale revenue during the five weeks following the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) initial public-health advisory. Prices for conventional and organic strawberries fell nearly 30 percent beyond what could be explained by normal seasonal and supply conditions. The losses were especially impactful because the advisory was issued near the beginning of California’s peak strawberry season and initially did not clearly identify the strawberries as imported.

The current (2026) Cyclospora outbreak profoundly demonstrates the severity of spillover effects for domestic fresh produce. Although a portion of the outbreak was associated with iceberg lettuce from Mexico, California growers supplied most of the lettuce available during that period. Nevertheless, the most recent data released from Numerator estimates a loss of roughly $280 million in consumer spending on fresh produce for every month that concerns regarding Cyclospora continue. The same poll estimates that around 6.5 million households stopped buying salad mixes and kits in July, and per-household spending was down 10.7 percent. California growers reportedly destroyed approximately one-third of harvest-ready lettuce crops, laid off workers and experienced canceled orders during the first active weeks of the outbreak.

Fresh produce is particularly exposed because it is often marketed as an interchangeable commodity. Consumers recognize “lettuce,” “strawberries” or “cantaloupe,” but usually do not know the grower, growing region or country of origin—particularly when eating in restaurants or purchasing processed or mixed products. Although federal country-of-origin labeling applies to covered fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables at qualifying retailers, restaurants and other foodservice establishments are exempt, as are commodities incorporated into processed foods. When a public-health communication identifies a commodity without clearly identifying its origin, supplier, brand and distribution period, a lack of clarity pushes many consumers to avoid the entire category.

Unlike automobiles, toys or other durable products, fresh produce cannot be held until consumer confidence returns. Crops are planted months in advance, harvested within narrow windows and rapidly lose their value. When demand disappears, growers must accept sharply lower prices, leave crops unharvested or destroy market-ready food. Thus, consequences extend to farm workers, processors, cooling facilities, distributors, shippers and rural agricultural communities. Even a relatively short advisory can eliminate an entire season’s profit.

Negative economic spillover impacts also include domestic growers bearing food safety expenses, such as enhanced audits, testing, training, equipment improvements and other compliance costs that may not be imposed consistently (or at all) on foreign growers (even in the foreign region and with the commodity that was associated with an outbreak or recall). If the responsible foreign farm and importer (region or country, when applicable) do not face equivalent investigation, corrective-action and verification requirements, domestic growers suffer a double economic penalty: they absorb the market losses caused by the imported failure while continuing to finance a more demanding prevention system.

If these spillover effects are not addressed, consumer consequences will extend beyond temporary shortages. Repeated, broadly communicated outbreaks can erode trust in entire produce categories and encourage consumers to purchase fewer fresh fruits and vegetables. This is particularly concerning because federal nutrition policy continues to include objectives to increase fruit and vegetable consumption, while research associates inadequate consumption with greater risk of chronic disease.

As a result of continued consequences of negative economic spillover, consumers also face reduced choice, less reliable domestic availability and higher long-term prices. Growers confronting repeated losses may plant fewer acres, avoid open-market production or be forced to shut their doors. Reduced domestic capacity would further increase reliance on imported produce, compounding the situation. USDA estimates that imports already supplied approximately 59 percent of U.S. fresh-fruit availability and 35 percent of fresh-vegetable availability in 2023, compared with 50 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in 2007.

This creates the potential for a self-reinforcing cycle: imported-product failures damage domestic producers; domestic production contracts; import dependence increases; and future failures from foreign operations expose an even larger share of the domestic food supply.

Reducing the impact of economic spillover on domestically grown fresh produce does not mean withholding information from consumers but does require providing better information more quickly. Public health communications should identify country of origin, growing region, supplier, brand, distribution channel and affected dates as soon as the evidence permits—and promptly correct any earlier speculation. Traceability and regulatory accountability must extend through importers to foreign farms and packing operations as required by law. Without these improvements, blameless U.S. growers will continue to bear the economic consequences of imported-produce failures, while consumers ultimately bear the larger costs through improperly managed food safety regulatory oversight, declining confidence, reduced consumption, diminished domestic production and greater dependence on imported food.