Four rewrites in 16 days: Taylor Farms' shifting cyclospora story

Food-safety attorney Bill Marler tracks how Taylor Farms has quietly rewritten its public statement about a cyclospora outbreak four times since the July 17 recall, treating each version as legal evidence rather than PR. The original July 17 post named a specific independent farm — described as under one percent of U.S. iceberg supply — as FDA’s traceback target, and justified pulling product a full day before any positive lab result existed. That amounts to a party admission tied to FDA traceback and epidemiology. Subsequent versions steadily walked it back: the July 19 rewrite led with a claim that FDA had apologized (Marler says no apology exists — FDA only corrected a false-positive test and kept calling the product ‘implicated’), the July 24 version foregrounded $200M in audited safety spending and silently dropped the apology claim, and the July 30–31 rebuild spun up a dedicated ‘Cyclospora hub’ that now contradicts itself on whether recalled product reached 27 or 28 states, omitting West Virginia in one paragraph despite it being one of nine outbreak states.