Ex-FDA Chief: Taylor Farms' White House Recall Delay Request 'Not Standard'

On a Sunday morning in late July, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb sat down for an interview on CBS and said something that cut through weeks of confusion surrounding a sprawling cyclospora outbreak: what Taylor Farms had done was not how things normally work. The company, he explained, had contacted the White House asking for more time before federal investigators publicly connected it to the multi-state outbreak that had sickened thousands of people.

Gottlieb's bluntness carried weight. He had run the FDA through previous food safety crises—romaine lettuce contaminated with E. coli, spinach tainted with the same pathogen. In those cases, he said, the White House was informed of developments so officials could prepare their public responses. But no one from the company ever called asking for a delay. "It was not standard operating procedure," Gottlieb said. "And it wasn't standard operating procedure when I was at FDA."

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Taylor Farms representatives had indeed reached out to the White House, requesting additional time before the government publicly attributed the outbreak to the company. The White House then asked FDA officials to join the call. During that conversation, Taylor Farms argued that federal investigators lacked definitive laboratory evidence directly linking its products to the outbreak. The company also expressed concern that the government was overstating its role in the crisis. Internally, Taylor Farms executives believed they hadn't received clear enough guidance from the FDA about what evidence supported a recall or how broad that recall should be.

The cyclospora outbreak itself had been a mess of contradictory statements and reversals. Initially, iceberg lettuce from a single supplier—Taylor Farms de Mexico—was identified as the likely source, and the company issued a voluntary recall. Then the FDA announced that lettuce outside the recall had tested positive for cyclospora. A day later, the agency walked that back, saying the test was a false positive. The recall remained in place, the FDA insisted, even as confusion deepened. Taylor Farms posted a statement on its website claiming the FDA had apologized, though no public apology was ever documented. The company also said the FDA had not identified a single positive test result for cyclospora in its products. Days later, Taylor Farms clarified that the recall was still active and that it had stopped sourcing iceberg lettuce from central Mexico for the season.

Weeks of oscillating responses from federal health officials had left the public and industry observers questioning both how the investigation was being conducted and how Taylor Farms was communicating about it. The outbreak itself was serious—cyclospora causes severe gastrointestinal illness and had affected thousands. Yet the messaging around it had become so tangled that it was difficult to know what was actually known, what remained uncertain, and who was responsible for what. Gottlieb's comment about the White House call added another layer to that confusion: it suggested that normal channels for handling food safety crises had been bypassed, and that a company facing potential blame had sought political intervention to buy time.