Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
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.
1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination.
This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
Not to diminish this for anyone affected, but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
I never stopped buying or eating lettuce.
Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.
I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't.
Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad.
So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning.
Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
These are two unrelated events though.
Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact.
The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.
No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.