Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk

It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet.

Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.

Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.

I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).

There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.

With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.

There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.

Here's a pretty good video about the problem in general. https://youtu.be/nyG-np0S0ZQ

The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.

Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.

I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.

A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).

Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.

But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.

I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.

> Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago

There are many sensible places between Taylor Farms and backyard agriculture.

Or you can say, that the outbreaks will be much more bigger as a result of centralization of facilities. For example one small batch could contaminate other lettuces in shared facilities.

They also have more incentive and capability to optimize right up to (and past) safety lines. And the impersonal corporate distance from the pride in quality of production matters too.

With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.

And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.

i suspect the concerns are, if your food is killing people or making them sick:

1) how big is the fallout,

2) how insulated from repercussions are you?

if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.

a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.

i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.

"if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't."

Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.

This consolidation argument only works up to 1-3 processing plants. After a company owns more than that, there's no more efficiency from automation, only market dominance and abuse.

I myself would trust produce from smaller local farms more than larger farms, however I also live near the farms and know what is in season and don't deal with the problems of people reselling food like they often do in "farmers markets" near or in large urban centers.

Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.

Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.

Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.

Our current government is actively rolling back safety measures so these single points of failure become much more pronounced. I don't know but I would bet that companies like this are actively lobbying to have those safety measure reduced. It seems like deflection what you're saying. Yes, things are better than before, but they could still be better and trying to stop people from talking about that isn't helpful or wise.

Consolidation does not improve food safety. Read the ISO's. The standards of the industry are equally effective at a scale of 10 or 1000 different orgs. Everyone watches everyone else, and makes batches traceable, and those who don't are told to shape up by downstream, or they lose downstream consumers.

Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)

the guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.

do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.

The argument from the article is when things go wrong (as what happened w/ Taylor), the damage is widespread, whereas damage is contained locally.

As a thought experiment, there's a big difference between "3 companies share 70% of a market, while 30 companies sharing the remaining 30%", and "30 companies share the whole market, none being larger than 8%".

In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.

On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).

Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.

> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?

Like.. before? When we didn't have nationwide food recalls that had seeped into nationwide fast food chains and bagged products distributed into every commercial food selling outlet, under a myriad of different names?

I would personally like to see fines commensurate with the size of the organization.

The United States has allowed many industries to consolidate, but the fines they face when they mess up are infinitely small compared to their size.

> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?

Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.

Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.

While the first made up quote is inline with what Friedman said over 45 years ago [0], I'm not seeing anything that resembles the second one? In fact, he warned against the influence that large corporations can have on the government [1].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg

It's worth pointing out that Milton Friedman's words are regularly taken out of context. His full quote:

> "In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility' reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

> The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct 'social responsibility,' rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.

> But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other."

His point wasn't that businesses can't act ethically or with responsibility, it's that they shouldn't act to become welfare centers and corporate philanthropies (which was a trend at the time). And I think even the most anti-capitalist person would agree that corporation acting "charitably" should be treated with a huge eye of skepticism.

1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better.

2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.

Luckily the article includes a PDF with multiple recommendations at the end. https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Reco...

> There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers

Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.

I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.

I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.

Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...

this sounds a lot like "vote with your wallet" and then you look in 99% of the wallets and it's like, here's a few million dollars vs trillionaires.

I don't know if you're a bit out of the loop, but ... meat is very much not at issue in this case.

TFA is about contaminated lettuce my meatless friend