ATLANTA (AP) — Federal health officials have identified lettuce from Mexico served at Taco Bell locations across five U.S. states as a source of a widespread outbreak of diarrhea-causing parasite cyclospora.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late Thursday warned consumers not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. A record number of cyclospora cases have been reported in more than 30 states, and experts have said not every recent U.S. illness might be caused by a single source.
A Food and Drug Administration investigation so far has identified a single supplier of the lettuce. The federal warnings to consumers did not identify the company, but Taylor Fresh Foods, of Salinas, California, said FDA testing indicated it was “a specific independent farm” affiliated with the company.
The FDA was working with the supplier “to determine if potentially contaminated shredded iceberg lettuce remains on the market,” including in other states, the CDC said. “Taco Bell has committed to stop using any lettuce from the supplier identified by FDA’s traceback investigation.”
Taylor Farms has been tied to foodborne outbreaks in the past. The company said in a statement Friday afternoon that it was voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the U.S. market.
“As a family owned and operated company, we are deeply concerned for those who became ill, their families, and the many Americans whose trust in the safety of their fresh produce has been shaken,” the statement said.
CDC, FDA and public health officials in several states have been investigating a multistate outbreak of cyclospora infections.
The illness is not usually life threatening and is typically treated with antibiotics.
On Thursday, ahead of the federal government's confirmation, Taco Bell issued a statement saying that it had taken “immediate action to voluntarily remove potentially impacted lettuce from a supplier in select states. The affected ingredient from our supplier is being indefinitely removed from our supply chain nationwide and will be replaced within 24 hours in select states.”
In a statement, federal health officials stressed that other “brands, restaurants, retailers, or distribution channels” could be tied to the outbreak as the investigation continues.
Michigan investigators are trying to figure out if the lettuce went to other restaurants or stores because many of the ill people said they didn’t eat at Taco Bell, state health officials said Friday.
There is no evidence the outbreak “is related to poor food handling or preparation at any single restaurant or fast-food chain,” Michigan health officials said in a statement.
For that reason, they continue to recommend that consumers purchase whole heads of lettuce instead of pre-washed, bagged lettuce or pre-mixed salad kits. Taylor Fresh Foods said in its statement that no Taylor Farms-branded salad kits contain iceberg lettuce.
Some past outbreaks linked to the company involved products sold under different brand names.
North Carolina health officials on Friday reported their count has now surpassed 300 cases, but said the recent illnesses there are not considered to be linked to the outbreak in and around Michigan. They said the most commonly reported foods include parsley, cilantro and lettuce, but it’s not clear if those ingredients were the source of the infections, they said.
Cyclospora is a microscopic, spherical parasite that commonly causes watery diarrhea “with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements,” according to the CDC. Outbreaks tend to occur most often in the late spring and summer.
The heat-loving parasite infects the bowels and spreads through feces. In the past, people have been infected by consuming fruits or vegetables that were exposed to feces-contaminated irrigation water.
The illness, called cyclosporiasis, is less common than foodborne illnesses caused by other germs, including salmonella and E. coli. Many cases are never linked to a specific food or other source and, for years, few U.S. cyclospora outbreaks were reported. But the number started rising about a decade ago, with a particularly notable spike in 2018 and 2019.
Previously, 2019 saw the most reported U.S. cyclosporiasis cases, with about 4,700. The current surge has far surpassed that. Michigan — the apparent epicenter of the current outbreak — is reporting more than 5,000 cases, and more than 2,000 additional probable and suspected cases have been reported in other states.
No deaths have been reported. But Michigan officials say more than 100 people in that state have been hospitalized, and health officials say dozens more have been hospitalized in other states.
Experts attribute the increasing trend in cases to climate change and better detection. They also say it’s likely that cyclospora cases historically were underreported, for several reasons.
Some common tests used to check for food poisoning have not been geared to detect cyclospora. Technicians aren’t able to grow the parasite in labs, making it hard to draw evidence from contaminated produce. And it can be hard to figure out what food sick people had in common because sometimes it’s a single ingredient that might be common in multiple recipes — like basil or cilantro.
The FDA’s traceback investigation identified a single supplier of iceberg lettuce from Mexico used by the Taco Bell locations where people who got sick ate, federal officials said.
The Mexican food chain is among the restaurants linked to foodborne illness outbreaks in the past.
Taylor Farms also was tied to a 2013 cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to salad mix and a 2024 E. coli outbreak tied to onions served at McDonald's.
Stobbe reported from New York.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
This undated photo taken through a microscope provided by the CDC shows Cyclospora cayetanensis oocysts found in a fresh stool sample which had been prepared with a formalin solution and stained with safranin. (CDC via AP)
A Taco Bell fast food restaurant is shown Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in Taylor, Mich. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 9, 2026--
Certinia today unveiled the System of Action for services businesses, which understands context, applies judgment, and then acts on trusted data and reasoning, so that every decision drives toward real business outcomes.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260909879512/en/
According to the 2026 Global Service Dynamics Report, an independent survey of 1,000 services and IT leaders worldwide, nearly all (98%) have deployed AI in their organization, but only 20% say it has exceeded expectations. Among those reporting success, 70% describe their operations as aligned or fully integrated across sales, delivery, finance, and customer success. Certinia's System of Action is built for exactly that kind of connectivity — uniting the data, the judgment, and the ability to act so that services organizations can run their businesses with certainty.
Certinia's System of Action powers modern services organizations through three integrated components. The first is foundational context: Certinia brings together professional services, customer success, financial management, and CRM data with the unstructured reality of daily work — calls, threads, meetings — into one unified source of truth, closing the gap between what's happening on the ground and what the business needs to know in real-time. The second is compounding intelligence; built on more than 17 years of Certinia's services domain expertise, drawn from the breadth of real projects, timecards, resourcing decisions, and estimates processed across its workflows, so judgment sharpens with every decision. The third is agentic action, which carries that judgment out exactly when and where it's needed, bringing the right knowledge and reasoning to every action across the services lifecycle.
Strengthening the System of Action is the largest expansion of Certinia's Veda AI suite to date, delivering an unprecedented solution purpose-built to operate businesses and accelerate sales & delivery across the entire services lifecycle. This includes new agents, a doubled library of Veda Intelligent Actions (VIAs) that bring Certinia's services expertise directly into existing workflows, and deployment options that provide the flexibility for organizations to use the AI in ways that best fit their stack, strategy, and requirements.
"AI can only move the needle for our customers when it's grounded in real business context and judgment they can trust — a system that understands the business, reasons through it, and acts with little to no margin for error," said DJ Paoni, Chief Executive Officer, Certinia. "That's what our System of Action delivers. Only Certinia can combine a trusted, unified data foundation with our breadth of services expertise and deep business reasoning to meet the accuracy standards services businesses require — and it's why our latest agentic capabilities help customers unlock stronger margins, faster time-to-outcome, and greater customer value."
“Organizations that connect management efficiency gains to delivery quality improvements achieve the strongest overall ROI. The key design principle: AI must be integrated across the full life cycle, not deployed as isolated tools in individual functions,” said Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, Enterprise Software and Agents, IDC ¹.
New Veda Agents to Run the Business and Accelerate Sales & Delivery
Certinia's expanded suite of agentic capabilities introduces a lineup of 14 new out-of-the-box Veda agents to accelerate sales and delivery.
Each agent turns the unstructured context of daily work into organizational memory, so automation gets sharper, capturing best practices with every project instead of starting from zero each time.
Using Veda's new agentic capabilities, services teams are able to:
Expanded Veda Intelligent Actions and Capabilities to Streamline Workflows
Certinia has more than doubled the library of Veda Intelligent Actions (VIAs) from 64 to 135. Veda Intelligent Actions are bite-sized, reusable capabilities that bring Certinia's deep domain expertise directly into a customer's workflow and whatever tools their teams already use.
New VIA capabilities offer benefits across every part of a services business:
AI Your Way Provides a New Level of Deployment Flexibility
Most vendors force customers to either adopt their proprietary AI or bring their own and lose depth. With Certinia’s new AI Your Way features, service firms no longer have to compromise. These capabilities provide flexibility across the Veda AI suite, letting organizations use the AI and agentic framework that fits their stack, strategy, and requirements.
Certinia's AI Your Way capabilities give services organizations the option to:
Whether an organization is standardized on Agentforce, building on Claude or Microsoft Copilot, or wants Certinia's own native AI platform to do the heavy lifting, every path draws from the same library of trusted, governed actions grounded in the right context and judgment.
Committing to 100% Agentic Capability Coverage by Year End
Today’s release accelerates a broader trajectory that will culminate in 100% agentic capability coverage across Certinia’s System of Action by year-end, comprising 40+ agents and 300+ VIAs across the services lifecycle. Every professional services, customer success, and financial workflow will be able to be executed by an agentic capability or a human, giving organizations total flexibility in how they operate.
The Advantage That Compounds
As AI models become increasingly interchangeable, competitive advantage will shift to organizations holding the specific data and judgment those models depend upon to act. While every services organization will soon have access to roughly the same AI intelligence, they will not have the same underlying data, institutional judgment, or track record of decisions made and outcomes fed back into ongoing judgment.
That is the unique advantage Certinia has that no other PSA vendor built on siloed functionality can replicate. Certinia's depth of proprietary context and intelligence is what makes Veda the most complete and trustworthy agentic solution built on real business judgment, and it is why Certinia is the durable advantage the world's leading services organizations are built upon to help them protect margins, shorten time-to-outcome, and grow customer value with certainty.
To learn more and see the System of Action in practice, register for Certinia's live webinar Insight to Impact: Introducing the System of Action for Modern Services on September 30, 2026, as product experts demonstrate the system and how it can benefit your organization.
¹ IDC, Operationalizing AI in Professional Services: Practical Steps Toward an Intelligent Operating Model, #US54625226, June 2026
About Certinia
Certinia is the leading System of Action for services businesses, powering organizations with the unified source of truth, services expertise and reasoning, and agentic action to bring the right knowledge and judgment to every decision across the entire services lifecycle. Purpose-built for professional services, customer success, and financial management, the world’s leading services organizations rely on Certinia to maximize margins, deliver faster time-to-outcome, and grow customer value with certainty. Certinia is backed by Haveli Investments, TA Associates, General Atlantic, and Salesforce Ventures. For more information, visit www.certinia.com.
Certinia's System of Action architecture, spanning Professional Services, Customer Success, and Financial Management.
