NPR.
This is The Indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Waylon Wong.
And I'm Ricky Mulvey.
This week, state health officials in Michigan announced two deaths linked to the intestinal illness cyclosporiasis.
These were the first reported deaths from a nine-state outbreak that's been traced back to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms.
The Michigan Health Department said cyclosporiasis is generally not life-threatening and that the two people who died had significant underlying health conditions.
These fatalities, though, have raised the stakes on a food safety scare that's gripped the U.S. over the last month.
It's also put two companies in the spotlight, Taylor Farms and Taco Bell.
These companies are facing a slew of challenges that others have grappled with before.
Remember, foodborne outbreaks, and in some cases, even deaths related to Boar's Head, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle.
Yeah, what do you say publicly when your product could be making people sick?
Today on the show, we assess Taco Bell and Taylor's Farms' responses so far and look at how Chipotle managed a similar crisis more than a decade ago.
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The Centers for Disease Control have counted almost 2,000 people who have gotten sick in the cyclospora outbreak.
The first cases popped up in late June.
It wasn't until mid-July that Taco Bell and Taylor Farms were named as the companies involved in the outbreak.
And how have they handled their response so far?
We called up someone who's been through this before, Chris Arnold.
He was director of communications at Chipotle in 2015.
That's when the company had its own food safety crisis.
He remembers leaving the office on the Friday before Halloween weekend in 2015.
My route out of the office took me right past our senior most food safety person who flagged me down on my way out of the office and said,
Hey, just a heads up, I just got off the phone with the FDA.
It sounds like they're investigating a small number of E. coli cases that may be connected to one of our restaurants in the Northwest.
E. coli is a bacteria, but like the parasite cyclospora, outbreaks are often related to poor handwashing.
Back in 2015, more than 50 people got sick from E. coli that federal investigators said likely came from Chipotle.
By that Friday evening, Chris said the company had started an internal investigation to trace ingredients and take other early steps.
This included figuring out what to say publicly.
Chris had already dealt with an earlier food safety scare at Chipotle involving norovirus.
So he and others at the company, they had some previous experience.
Generally speaking, you want to be first to say things.
You want to drive the narrative around what's happening to the best of your ability.
In this case, health officials in Washington state put out a statement naming Chipotle on Halloween.
Chipotle released a statement around the same time saying it had immediately closed all restaurants in the area.
Chris says communications during a crisis like a foodborne illness requires both discipline and urgency.
Discipline to not get ahead of what's happening with the official investigation and urgency so as to not leave a vacuum that can get filled up with rumors from Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit.
For example, fast forward to today's crisis, photos were circulating on Reddit of a Taco Bell in Michigan with a sign saying that not just lettuce, but also onion and cilantro and other ingredients were subject to a nationwide recall.
Not true.
In the modern era where social media has created such an immediacy around information, you're often doing that without a whole lot of information.
And so what you do is share what you can.
So, was Taco Bell quick enough?
Chris says he thinks the company acted appropriately.
When the FDA announced it was investigating an outbreak linked to the lettuce served at Taco Bell locations, the company said it voluntarily removed potentially impacted lettuce.
That same day, media reports identified Taylor Farms as the lettuce supplier.
A day after that, Taylor Farms issued a statement.
It said it voluntarily recalled all iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.
This lettuce was identified as the potential source of one of the cyclospora outbreaks.
Timothy Coombs is a senior partner with the Center for Risk Communication.
It's an organization that specializes in crisis PR.
He says that in his view, Taylor Farms could have responded faster.
Taylor Farms was slow to really kind of embrace this.
But once they came around, they really start talking about food safety and they put a lot of emphasis on it.
So they were slow, but they got there in the end.
Timothy says that besides speed, there are a couple other crucial elements of good crisis communications.
First, focus on the victims.
Second, give specific details about next steps.
The first priority is public safety and wellbeing.
That's it.
Once you take care of that, then you can turn your attention more to sort of reputational management.
If you start with like, I'm going to protect the financial interests of this organization at all costs, it's going to fail terribly.
Because you are going to make statements, you're going to take actions that actually work against the victims.
And even people who aren't directly affected are going to be upset and really dislike your organization.
But what about the shareholders?
When someone think of the shareholders.
Anyway, Timothy says an infamous example of a company failing to center victims is BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The company's CEO said on television that he wanted his life back.
BP survived as a company, but its response has become a public relations case study in what not to do.
Its brand suffered, its CEO was replaced, and its stock price still hasn't gotten back to pre-crisis levels.
Before Timothy became a crisis PR practitioner, he studied the field as an academic.
He says research shows that when companies focus on victims, both their finances and their reputations recover faster.
I'm talking about there's like a minimization strategy, like let's just minimize this.
Yeah, you're just going to suffer longer, really, as a result of that.
Take your punishment fast and early, recover more quickly.
Don't worry, shareholders.
We're still focusing on you.
We love shareholder value.
Last week, Taco Bell's parent company said that same-store sales in the U.S. are down 2% in the current quarter but recovering.
CEO Chris Turner said the company's measures of online sentiment have already bounced back to pre-cyclospora levels and that he believes customers understand the issue is not specific to Taco Bell.
And customers may understand that intestinal issues with Taco Bell, they may have happened before.
Don't get us sued, Ricky.
Chris Arnold, who led communications for Chipotle during the E. coli outbreak, says this public perception is crucial.
Do people see a foodborne illness as a safety issue involving multiple brands, or is it a story about one specific brand being a culprit?
In the case of Chipotle, Chris says, the narrative was about the restaurant chain no longer being trustworthy.
An added challenge was that no cause of the E. coli was ever determined.
The government investigation didn't come up with a specific food or ingredient linked to the illness.
Only that something served at Chipotle was a likely source.
When you can get a cause identified and get that out of your system quickly, out of your supply system, then you can kind of turn the page and begin the effort to rebuild.
Until then, it's really, really difficult to do.
I mean, you can't start rebuilding the house while it's still on fire.
You got to get the fire out first and then you can start rebuilding.
In Chipotle's case, the company revamped food safety procedures.
It rolled out DNA testing of many of its ingredients to screen for pathogens like E. coli.
It started offering paid sick leave to employees.
It hired a new executive director of food safety.
And in 2019, Chipotle hit an important milestone.
Its stock price recovered fully from its post-E. coli declines.
That was four years and one CEO after the outbreak.
Timothy Coombs, the crisis PR expert, says food safety problems require extra sensitivity because they involve something that people put in their bodies.
If you put it on you or in you, you have a much different relationship to this product that has a strong emotional component to it.
So you have to recognize...
We have to deal with people and their emotions and just allow these emotions to flow out.
It just takes time.
And time is forgetting.
Forgetting might not be the best way.
You don't remember it anymore.
You don't make that connection in your mind anymore back to that crisis.
And given how previous outbreaks have gone, that mental connection may linger for a while.
I'm ready to go back to bagged lettuce.
How about you, Waylon?
Are you really?
No.
I'm just all carbs now.
I'm not even going to eat a vegetable.
This episode was produced by Corey Bridges and engineered by Anli Huang.
It was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez.
KK Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.
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