美国生鲜蔬菜巨头Taylor Farms：供应链垄断与食品安全隐忧

Speaker 1: Whether you're having Chipotle or you're mixing a salad from a grocery store kit, there's a good chance those ingredients come from Taylor Farms, one of the world's largest producers of fresh cut vegetables and salads. The company did around $7.3 billion in sales last year. After years of consolidation, Taylor Farms now owns and operates nearly every point of the supply chain. Speaker 2: The consolidation has camouflaged sources, but the benefit is it's good prices.

It's all put in one big pot. And if that pot has now gone bad, that affects the entire downstream logistic food chain of all of the restaurants. Speaker 1: And it has. This summer, Taylor Farms has been at the center of Cyclosporiasis and Salmonella outbreaks linked to its facilities in Mexico. While patient tracking data have linked the company to the outbreak, a direct link is yet to be established. The company has issued several multi-state recalls, and the FDA updated food safety guidelines for producers of fresh cut products.

Speaker 3: Is it just a coincidence that Salmonella is happening at the same time as Cyclospora. Do we ever get to the bottom of Cyclospora? What's with the jalapeños? Like I, as a consumer, feel completely overwhelmed and confused. Speaker 4: Americans should have full confidence in the food supply in this country. FDA investigates dozens of foodborne illness outbreaks each year. Speaker 5: Taylor Farms is interesting because it continually denies that it had anything to do with this.

Nobody's tested and found anything on our farm. Well, no. No they haven't, because lettuce gets eaten doesn't get saved. Speaker 1: It's hard to pinpoint Taylor Farms full market share. It operates in three different segments, selling salad kits and major grocery stores, servicing some of the biggest fast food chains like Taco Bell, and offering ready to eat products sold in delis across the country. Taylor Farms competitive advantage is its infrastructure.

It partners with hundreds of family farms for most of the produce, Taylor does the rest. That means everything from refrigerating, washing, chopping, packaging, labeling, shipping and distributing. That's why the company has become so vital to its customers. 40% of all salad kits at grocery stores are from Taylor. Taylor farms was founded in 1995, and by 2010, even before its acquisition spree, it claimed to be the nation's largest salad producer.

Over the course of the next 15 years, it either bought up or invested in at least a dozen companies domestically and internationally. Some of them were salad competitors, like Earthbound Farm in 2019. Others were processing facilities like Club Chef or tech assets like agricultural robotics company Farmwise in 2025. Speaker 5: If they can promise institutions that have multiple locations all over the country that they can supply what they need on a regular basis, then for a restaurant chain, it's easier for them to deal with a major multinational company than it is to deal with local farmers.

Speaker 1: Taylor Farms declined CBC's request for an interview but did provide us with comments. We also reached out to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to ask if either agency had challenged or reviewed any of Taylor's mergers and acquisitions. The DOJ did not respond to CBC's request, and the FTC said it could not provide additional details without knowing the purchase price of the transactions.

Those numbers are not always disclosed publicly, which makes it difficult to determine whether individual deals met the threshold for antitrust review. Our independent search did not identify any public records showing that the FTC challenged a Taylor Farm's acquisition. Experts have told me that antitrust reviews can help governments keep track of companies whose scale may have an outsized effect on consumers, such as car quality, utility prices and food safety.

But the broader question isn't simply whether any of those deals should have been stopped. It's what happens when a market leader becomes an increasingly important part of America's food supply chain, and then something goes wrong. Speaker 2: The consolidation in the food business has helped restaurants on the user and the distribution. They guarantee availability all the time, consistency of product, consistency of delivery logistically.

So here's the perfect storm. The company that you've relied on has suddenly gotten into trouble because one farm in one place in Mexico contaminated some lettuce, and that lettuce went into their distribution system and turned it into, in our country, a culinary national nightmare. Speaker 1: But it's not the first time Taylor Farms has been in the news tied to an outbreak. To name a few, in 2009, it was Salmonella. In 2013 Cyclospora sickened over 600 people in the U.S., and just two years ago, McDonald's onions were linked to an E.

Coli outbreak. The latest, on August 26th, Reuters reported that at least five of the company's facilities have failed to report some federally required workplace injury logs over the past five years. Speaker 5: Companies want to produce food as cheaply as possible and are willing to cut corners, and that means you need oversight. Speaker 1: And to be clear, recalls happen every year, despite companies best efforts to reduce contaminants.

Taylor Farms says it invests $200 million annually into independently auditing and verifying food safety protocols, and that there have been no confirmed positive sample results for product testing for Cyclospora as of early August. Taylor also says it tests its leafy greens and water sources and conducts independent audits, as well as maintains traceability systems that allow the company to track products back to a specific grower, lot and harvest.

Speaker 5: The existing regulations aren't bad. The problem is they're not enforced. And if what you want is light enforcement of anything that's going to be expensive and cost you money, it's very nice to have political power. You can go to Congress and say, we don't want to do that. Speaker 1: Taylor Farms has spent millions on anti-regulatory lobbying in recent years. However, the company rejects any suggestion that its political contributions or lobbying have resulted in favorable treatment from regulators, calling those allegations false.

Taylor Farms products are stocked at many of the biggest grocers in the country like Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods, target and H-E-B, either with its own branding or as store branded private labels like Marketside, private selection and fresh selections. It also supplies some of the biggest restaurants in the country, largely because of its ability to customize produce. Think pre dicing onions for McDonald's or shredding lettuce for Taco Bell.

Speaker 2: Those restaurants don't need to pay somebody $16, $17 or $18 an hour to cut up lettuce and onions and jalapeños. They get food chain benefit and they get a reduction of labor. Speaker 1: But the reliance on Taylor Farms also makes these companies financially vulnerable. Take a look at how share prices of some of the biggest restaurant chains have performed since the FDA announced the Cyclospora outbreak. Of course, these companies are also facing pressure from inflation and a pullback in consumer spending.

While recent outbreaks are being linked back to industrial growers and producers, science suggests they're still safer than smaller operations. Speaker 2: That small farm, it's romantic to think about it, but when you need that product the same way every day, and you don't know about the safety, and not every farmer is a great farmer, you've lost a lot of your control and your standardization. Speaker 1: Another problem is the recent reduction in government oversight.

The FDA lost thousands of employees during the Doge cuts last year. Speaker 3: Has there been an impact to your agency and the CDC, or your coordination efforts from any of the Doge cuts that wer