Following the Chipotle playbook for the cyclospora crisis

**Chris Arnold** (0:01)
N-P-R.

**Wayland Wong** (0:06)
This is The Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Wayland Wong.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:09)
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.

**Wayland Wong** (0:23)
The Michigan Health Department said cyclosporiasis is generally not life-threatening, and that 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 US over the last month. It's also put two companies in the spotlight, Taylor Farms and Taco Bell.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:42)
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.

**Wayland Wong** (0:53)
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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**Wayland Wong** (2:22)
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.

**Ricky Mulvey** (2:36)
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 for Halloween weekend in 2015

**Chris Arnold** (2:54)
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.

**Wayland Wong** (3:21)
E coli is a bacteria, but like the parasite cyclospora, outbreaks are often related to poor hand washing. Back in 2015, more than 50 people got sick from E coli that federal investigators said likely came from Chipotle.

**Ricky Mulvey** (3:34)
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 had some previous experience.

**Chris Arnold** (3:54)
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.

**Wayland Wong** (4:06)
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.

**Ricky Mulvey** (4:17)
Chris says communications during a crisis like a food borne 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.

**Wayland Wong** (4:35)
For example, fast forward to today's crisis, photos are 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 nationwide recall. Not true.