Taylor Farms announced late Friday that it was recalling iceberg lettuce that had been shipped to retailers in 27 states because it was potentially contaminated with cyclospora, a parasite that can cause severe illness, including vomiting, cramping and explosive diarrhea.

Although the investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tied the parasite to lettuce that Taylor Farms shipped to Taco Bell in five states, the company’s recall notice suggests far broader distribution of potentially contaminated greens. The announcement listed eight brand codes but did not say what they stood for. The company did not immediately respond to questions about them on Saturday morning.

The recalled products were shipped starting June 29 through as recently as Thursday and have expiration dates through August third. The company said on social media that no Taylor Farms-branded salad kits were involved, but did not provide a list of the restaurants or grocers that may have sold its iceberg lettuce, which was also mixed with romaine in some products.

“At this time, Taylor Fresh Foods has not publicly provided distribution information or a list of customers who received the product that was voluntarily removed from the market,” the Food and Drug Administration said in its recall notice.

F.D.A. regulations do not require the company to do so, a source of frustration for food safety leaders.

“Food safety advocates have urged F.D.A. over the years to make this a requirement,” said Sandra Eskin, the executive director of Stop Foodborne Illness, an advocacy group. “Without this essential information, a recall is not going to be effective.”

She added: “The whole point is to quickly identify the product and make sure no one else eats it.”

States listed as part of the recall include Florida, Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Missouri and others. The recall notice does not list California or New York, but it is unclear if Taylor Farms supplied lettuce to companies in states affected by the recall that then distributed it widely.

Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, said in an emailed statement Friday evening that it was withdrawing all iceberg lettuce products from Mexico in its supply chain at the request of Taylor Farms.

“We will continue to actively monitor the situation and work with regulators as needed,” the company said, adding that it stopped selling and distributing those Taylor Farms products on Thursday.

US Foods, another large food distributor, said it had also notified affected customers about the recall on Friday, a spokeswoman said in an email.

So far at least 1,645 people have fallen ill and 141 have been hospitalized, most of them after consuming the lettuce sent to Taco Bell, which said it has removed all of the lettuce from its restaurants. The C.D.C. made that determination through scientific detective work, starting with case reports about people who fell ill and tracking back to a common food source. The case count is likely to rise as the C.D.C. factors in the scope of the recall.

The United States is on track to have more cyclospora cases in 2026 than in any previous year. The agency said it is investigating more than 5,100 additional illnesses that may have been caused by the parasite, which is transmitted through food or water contaminated with feces.

On Thursday evening, Taylor Farms executives met with the White House and Food and Drug Administration to try to distance the company from the outbreak and air concerns about the official investigations into the outbreak.

On Friday, the company said the information the F.D.A. presented led it to remove its iceberg lettuce from the market. The company said its Mexican processing plant Taylor Farms de Mexico in Guanajuato was voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.

The F.D.A. is planning to inspect the Guanajuato facility in coming days to determine how the cyclospora parasite got on the lettuce and track it through the supply chain.

Alice Callahan contributed reporting.

Taylor Farms, one of the nation’s largest producers of leafy greens and fresh vegetables, said on Friday that it would remove its products at the center of a cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened more than 1,600 people.

Based in California, the family-owned company is in the spotlight after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked an outbreak of cyclosporiasis to iceberg lettuce that Taylor Farms supplied to certain Taco Bell restaurants, according to two federal officials who declined to be named Thursday night.

The company said in an email Friday that it had “promptly initiated a voluntary removal of product” based on information provided by the Food and Drug Administration this week. “We are committed to taking proactive actions,” the company said.

Taylor Farms was founded in 1995 by Bruce Taylor, the third generation of an agricultural family in California’s Salinas Valley, the so-called salad bowl of the world.

Today, Taylor Farms is a vegetable behemoth, selling more than $7 billion worth of produce each year to grocery stores and restaurant chains. It grows food in more than a dozen states, as well as in Mexico and Canada, and has 30 processing facilities and 25,000 employees. Last year it said it made more than 40 percent of all salad kits sold in American groceries and provided 265 million servings of fresh vegetables each week.

But much of its sales to grocery retailers and restaurants are a mystery. The company — like other food producers — does not disclose which grocery stores or restaurants use its leafy greens or other vegetables.

Adding to the confusion, Taylor Farms sells most of its products to food distributors, who, in turn, sell them to restaurants and grocery stores.

For consumers, that uncertainty made them look at their lunchtime meals a bit differently this week. Was it safe to eat an arugula salad at lunch? Could shredded lettuce be added to a burrito?

“I’m not taking chances. It’s not worth it,” said Caren Bordowitz, who works in marketing at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Ill., as she passed on her usual purchase of a bag of lettuce from her local supermarket.

“Consumers rarely know where their fresh produce comes from, and cannot discern between romaine grown here or grown there,” said Joelle Mosso, the associate vice president of science programs at the Western Growers Association, an industry group.

The C.D.C. is advising consumers to not eat the lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The agency has stated that iceberg lettuce at grocery stores or served in other restaurants is not impacted.

However Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, said in an emailed statement Friday evening that it was withdrawing all iceberg lettuce products from Mexico in its supply chain at the request of Taylor Farms.

“We will continue to actively monitor the situation and work with regulators as needed,” the company said, adding that it stopped selling and distributing those Taylor Farms products on Thursday.

On Thursday night Taco Bell said it was removing “potentially impacted lettuce from a supplier in select states.” It did not name the supplier or the states. By Friday evening, the fast-food chain said it had removed the affected Taylor Farms lettuce from its restaurants and supply chain nationwide, based on “conversations with public health officials and out of an abundance of caution.”

Shares of Yum Brands, which owns the restaurant chain, slid nearly 9 percent this week.

Illness from cyclosporiasis is seasonal and tends to peak during the summer months. However, the United States is on track to have more cyclosporiasis cases in 2026 than in any previous year.

And while much of the current investigation is focusing on the outbreak involving iceberg lettuce sold to some Taco Bell locations, health officials are also investigating illnesses and outbreaks in other states that are unrelated, the C.D.C. said in its notice posted Thursday night.

For years, Taylor Foods has emphasized the importance of safety in the lettuce and the other produce it grows, knowing one incident can quickly wipe out consumer trust.

“Our whole industry relies on consumer confidence in the health and safety of our products,” Mr. Taylor said in an interview published earlier this year in Western Farm Press, a trade publication that focuses on farmers and ranchers. “All we can do is make sure we’re taking the steps that we know to take to ensure we’re producing safe food for our fellow Americans.”

The F.D.A.’s investigation into the outbreak appears to be focused on a farm in Mexico that grew the iceberg lettuce, and a facility nearby that shredded it, according to administration officials.

Taylor Farms has two processing facilities in Mexico, one in Baja California and another in Guanajuato.

Food and safety experts said this cyclosporiasis outbreak demonstrated the difficulty in completely eliminating risk from a food supply chain that often stretches across multiple countries and a number of growers, packagers, distributors and sellers who operate under different laws and with different food safety standards.

Over the years, Taylor Farms has been linked to previous outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. In 2013, following three recalls, the company was investigated by health officials in connection with an outbreak of illness that sickened hundreds of people in 22 states that involved greens used at Olive Garden, Red Lobster and possibly other restaurant chains.

More recently, health officials considered the company a likely source of an E. coli outbreak linked to onions served at McDonald’s in 2024 that resulted in 104 illnesses, 34 hospitalizations and one death. In October of that year, Taylor Farms recalled yellow onions.

Mr. Taylor, the company’s founder, has played a powerful role in the fresh produce industry. When two major produce associations joined forces in 2022 to form the International Fresh Produce Association, he was the inaugural chairman.

He has helped shape rules and regulations for the leafy greens industry. After an E. coli outbreak in 2006 killed three people, Mr. Taylor and other growers helped create the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, a food safety coalition funded by growers but administered by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Members of the agreement must adhere to food safety practices that go beyond what is required by the federal Agriculture Department or the F.D.A., including scheduled and unscheduled audits of their fields and processing systems.

A day after federal health officials tied an outbreak of cyclospora to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by the large produce company Taylor Farms to Taco Bell, investigators are turning their attention to the farms in Mexico where it was grown and the facility that shredded it, according to administration officials.

Among their most urgent questions is whether contaminated lettuce from the growers and processor has been shipped to other food retailers in the United States. Investigators from the Food and Drug Administration were planning to travel to Mexico to visit the farms and shredding facility and scour their records, an official said.

They are also investigating how the lettuce was contaminated by cyclospora. The parasite, which lays eggs that embed in the intestines when they are consumed, can cause explosive diarrhea, cramping, bleeding and other symptoms that can last weeks.

More than 1,644 people reported eating at Taco Bell before becoming sick with the parasitic infection, and 94 have been hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But dozens of others who had not eaten at Taco Bell have fallen ill from the parasite too.

As the investigation intensifies, Taylor Farms, among the nation’s largest producers of salad greens and vegetables, has hired a former Trump White House official.

On Thursday evening, company executives pressed the White House to keep the administration from identifying Taylor Farms as a source of the outbreak and tried to distance the company from it, according to an administration official who was not cleared to discuss the matter.

A spokeswoman from Taylor Farms said in an email that the company had initiated a voluntary removal of products based on the information provided by the F.D.A. on Thursday. The company also said that representatives met with White House and F.D.A. officials on Thursday to discuss what it viewed as “shortfalls in the F.D.A. and C.D.C.’s outbreak response process” and to focus on improving public health.

The spokeswoman said that federal officials had been investigating the outbreak for several weeks, but had only reached out to the company in recent days. The company said it was continuing to work cooperatively with the F.D.A. and the C.D.C. on the investigation.

The company recently hired Trent Morse, who was the deputy director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office until September, when he left to start a government relations firm called Morse Strategies.

Mr. Morse and the White House declined to comment.

The administration has not publicly named Taylor Farms. An official said that decision was related to legal concerns over confidential trade information about a company’s vendors.

F.D.A. officials are focusing on a large lettuce processing facility in northeastern Mexico called Taylor Farms de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V. in the state of Guanajuato, according to an administration official.

Agency records show that the last inspection of the food processor was in 2019 and the prior inspection was in 2011. In 2013, records show that the F.D.A. refused to accept a shipment of greens from the facility because of concerns about a pesticide.

The F.D.A., which has a broad mandate to oversee many foods imported to the United States from around the globe, has been hit hard by staff cuts ordered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and carried out by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the agency. Though food safety inspectors were not directly targeted for cuts, many accepted an early retirement offer. There were reductions among foreign inspectors’ support staff who book overseas travel, attend to inspector safety and help obtain travel documents.

As a result, the number of foreign food inspections plummeted last year, to 1,122 in 2025 from 1,751 in 2019.

Brian Ronholm, director of food policy for Consumer Reports, a watchdog group, said the F.D.A. had already struggled to inspect foreign food facilities before the staffing cuts.

“That really put it further behind to the point where it’s virtually nonexistent,” he said.

In addition, he said, one of the agency’s most-cited violations was over U.S. food companies’ failing to vet the quality and safety of imported food.

“The cuts across food safety, in terms of public health, in terms of regulatory, in terms of research, have contributed to to this,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University. “I don’t think it’s a direct cause, but it’s been a contributing factor.”

The C.D.C. advised the public to not eat shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.

While the government’s investigation is continuing, other forms of lettuce or greens appear to likely be safe based on what we know so far, said Keith R. Schneider, a professor of food safety at the University of Florida.

“There’s going to be a panic all over the country: ‘I’m not going to eat arugula, I’m not going to eat romaine.’ This has nothing to do with any other lettuce, any other varieties,” he said. “We see this, ‘Oh, lettuce, I’m not going to eat anything green for a month.’ No. That’s not the way this works.”

Food safety experts recommend rinsing all fresh produce before eating it.

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting from Washington.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked an outbreak of cyclosporiasis to iceberg lettuce that Taylor Farms supplied to Taco Bell, according to two federal officials who declined to be named.

The C.D.C. said the shredded lettuce was sent to Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. In a notice posted Thursday night, the agency warned the public not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in those states.

It remains unclear if Taylor Farms sent the lettuce to other vendors, said one of the officials, who was not cleared to speak for the administration. The C.D.C. has not publicly named Taylor Farms in its investigation.

A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms did not respond to requests for comment.

More than 1,644 people reported eating at Taco Bell before becoming sick with the parasitic infection, and 94 had been hospitalized, according to the C.D.C.

Food and Drug Administration officials also said the lettuce was grown by a single supplier in Mexico. The agency has stepped up screening at the border for the company’s lettuce, according to an agency update posted Thursday night.

The F.D.A. said that other restaurants and stores might be implicated as health officials continued their investigation. And not all Taco Bell locations in the five states had received the affected lettuce.

In a statement Thursday night, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily removing potentially affected lettuce it had received from a supplier in select states. It did not identify the supplier but said that the lettuce from that supplier would be “indefinitely removed” from its supply chain nationwide and would be replaced quickly.

The United States is on track to have more cyclospora cases in 2026 than in any previous year, with 1,645 confirmed cases and 141 hospitalizations across 34 states as of Monday, according to the C.D.C. The agency is investigating more than 5,100 additional illnesses that may have been caused by the parasite, which is transmitted through food or water contaminated with feces.

Health officials are also investigating other cyclosporiasis illnesses and outbreaks in other states that are unrelated to the one linked to Taco Bell, the C.D.C. said in its notice posted Thursday night.

Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, the chief medical executive for Michigan, said in an interview on Tuesday that not everyone sickened in the state had reported eating at a single restaurant. A supplier that sells a product to restaurants may also stock grocery stores, she said.

Many people who have gotten sick said they did not eat at Taco Bell.

Other states with higher than usual cyclospora cases this year include North Carolina, Illinois, Maryland and Texas.

With around $7 billion in annual revenue, Taylor Farms, based in Salinas, Calif., is one of the largest producers of fresh lettuce and vegetables in the country. Bags of its chopped salad kits can be found at Walmart, Whole Foods, Target and other grocery stores, and it is a leading supplier of lettuce and other produce to many large restaurant chains.

Taylor Farms has been involved in previous food-borne illness outbreaks, including a cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to salad mix that sickened hundreds in 2013. Health officials considered the supplier the likely source of an E. coli outbreak linked to onions served at McDonald’s in 2024 that resulted in 104 illnesses, 34 hospitalizations and one death.

The Washington Post was first to report the connection between Taylor Farms and the outbreak.

Once they are infected, it can take days to weeks for people to develop symptoms. The main symptom is frequent, watery diarrhea. A loss of appetite, cramping, bloating, gas, nausea, fatigue and weight loss can also occur. Though the illness rarely causes serious complications, its symptoms can sometimes linger for a month or more if untreated. Antibiotics are the main treatment.

Tracing cyclospora cases back to a source is a labor-intensive task. Health officials must interview thousands of people who have been infected about everything they ate and drank over weeks and then research the ingredients in each of their meals and snacks and investigate their suppliers. Because of their biology, parasitic infections tend to be much harder to link together than bacterial infections.

The outbreak comes as state and local health departments — which rely on C.D.C. funding to respond to food-borne illness outbreaks — face budget cuts and staff layoffs.

Julie Creswell and Kevin Draper contributed reporting.