Food safety events stopped being purely operational a while ago. They’re brand events now, and they move at the speed of a search result. This summer’s Cyclospora outbreak, traced by the FDA to iceberg lettuce from a single Mexican supplier and felt across restaurants, retailers and distributors, is a useful reminder for the whole category on the food industry’s growing need for crisis communication planning.
Here’s the readiness work worth doing before you need it:
1: Decide now that you’ll act ahead of confirmation.
The hardest call in a food safety event is pulling product before anyone requires you to. It’s expensive, operationally messy and made with incomplete information. Taco Bell made exactly that call this summer, removing suspect lettuce and produce from affected restaurants before the CDC named a source (a decision the FDA’s findings later validated). That instinct is the right one, and it’s much easier to follow when leadership has pre-agreed to the threshold rather than debating it under pressure.
2: Make your statement as brave as your decision.
This is where most brands leave value on the table. The public statement sees so many critical eyes that it’s flattened into language engineered to concede nothing. As our founder Kate Finley noted in Ad Age about that first statement, it’s critical not to undercut it with “lawyerese” and lose your brand advantage: your proactive control and voice.
It’s a fixable gap, and a good prompt for every brand to revisit its own toolkit. Remember that your audience already knows what you sound like, so when that familiar voice disappears and a corporate statement shows up in its place, people notice the shift before they process a single fact, and that distance is what makes them wonder what you aren’t saying. The voice you’ve spent years building is the reason people believe you, which makes a crisis the moment to lean on it rather than set it aside.
In practice, that means writing your holding statements with legal and comms in the room together, and writing them for the operators, buyers and guests you talk to every week. “Out of an abundance of caution” is the phrase every brand reaches for and no consumer believes.
3: Commit to an ongoing update cadence.
Publish updates on a set schedule even when there’s nothing new to report. Uncertainty will only prolong the negative conversation and is a breeding ground for assumptions. Plus, with AI assistants now summarizing whatever happens to be indexed when someone searches your name, new information from your brand will help outweigh the bad. If you aren’t feeding new information, another source is, and it may or may not be in your favor.
4: Bank brand equity now, because that’s what carries the recovery.
This is the most encouraging lesson of the summer. Taco Bell had years of talking to people like people, and it paid off: sales declines have moderated materially, with the brand roughly halfway back to prior-year levels and its fandom showing up again. That kind of goodwill can’t be built during a crisis. It’s built in the ordinary months, by brands that stay visible and human when there’s no emergency to respond to.
At the end of the day, the core of your crisis communication plan is the brand equity you’ve accumulated, plus your willingness to sound like yourself on the worst day.