Crisis Communication Lessons from the Cyclospora Outbreak

What’s Hot Right Now: Lessons on Food Safety Crisis Comms from the Cyclospora Outbreak

Most crisis plans get tested by something that starts well outside your own four walls. We watched this summer’s Cyclospora outbreak unfold and landed on four lessons worth acting on while the pressure is off:

Decide now that you’ll act ahead of confirmation: Taco Bell earned real credit for pulling product before regulators asked it to, and there’s a strong argument for settling that threshold as a leadership team long before the phone rings.
Make your statement as brave as your decision: Our founder, Kate Finley, told AdAge how easily a legal-first statement can erase the courage behind a decision like Taco Bell made and emphasized moments like these are when brand voice and audience awareness matter most.
Commit to an ongoing update cadence: A predictable rhythm of updates does more for a brand than one carefully worded statement, particularly now that AI summaries and social platforms shape a food safety story faster than any newsroom can.
Bank brand equity now, because it carries the recovery: Taco Bell guests are returning, and a good share of the credit belongs to the affection the brand built long before any of this started. Reputation earned in the quiet stretches is what shortens the loud ones.

Read the full POV: In a Food Safety Crisis, Speed Is Table Stakes. Translation Is the Advantage.

→ What’s changing in food safety communications

→ How to manage a food safety crisis on social media

Industry News: Your Buyers Are Asking AI About You

Our latest blog, GEO for B2B, covers how to find out whether you’re showing up.

Three numbers that reframe the priority:

Roughly 95% of AI citations come from non-paid sources (Muck Rack), about half of them published within the past year. It’s why earned media and third-party mentions drive discoverability more than site optimization alone, and why showing up accurately in AI answers is now an always-on job.

94% of B2B buyers now use LLMs while purchasing, and nearly every vendor that wins was on the buyer’s first shortlist (Whitehat, 2026). That list gets drafted before your sales team knows a deal exists.

96% of B2B companies don’t surface in early discovery queries, and only 22% of marketers track this at all (2X AI Visibility Index, 2026). The bar is genuinely low right now, which is the argument for moving early.

See How to Audit Your Brand’s AI Visibility

News We’re Noting:

Gartner Predicts PR Investment Will Double by 2027: The research firm’s latest forecast ties the surge directly to AI search. As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT and similar platforms to discover and vet brands, AI is pulling from earned media, not paid, to generate its recommendations. Muck Rack data backs this up: roughly 95% of links cited in AI-generated answers come from non-paid sources. The implication is straightforward: paid media is losing discovery leverage, and editorial credibility is gaining it. If you’ve been looking for a data-backed reason to shift budget toward PR, this is it.
LinkedIn Now Shows You Who’s Actually Seeing Your Posts: Rolling out since mid-June, post analytics now split impressions into in-network reach (your followers and connections) and out-of-network reach earned through feed recommendations, reshares and search. For B2B brands that’s the difference between talking to the room you already have and growing it. It’s live on personal profiles, not company pages, which is another argument for putting your executives’ names and voices behind thought leadership instead of routing everything through the brand handle.
A Stolen Truck of KitKats Just Won the PR Grand Prix at Cannes: Thieves posing as police made off with nearly half a million bars in Italy just before Easter. Rather than manage it quietly, Nestlé and Burson built the Stolen KitKat Tracker, letting shoppers scan barcodes to find out whether their bar came from the stolen batch. It drove 2.2 million engagements and an estimated $224 million in earned media value, and the Cannes jury credited it with rewriting the rules of crisis communications.