On October 7, 2026, FDA’s outbreak investigation table named the vehicle in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak it shares with USDA, FDA #1421 and FSIS 2026-04: “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps.” Thirty-eight people are sick. FDA said the wraps “were proactively removed from the market before the link to the outbreak was confirmed,” are past shelf life, and that the agencies are now looking at “possible ingredient level contamination.” FSIS’s outbreak table says it is working “to identify the contaminated ingredient and whether it was used in other products.” Food Safety News confirmed today that neither agency has disclosed the brand or the location.

I wrote earlier about what the agencies have and have not said. This post is about why it keeps happening, and about the two citizen petitions I have written to FDA to stop it.

There are two separate holes in the federal record, and this outbreak fell through both.

The first hole is the name. FDA treats the identity of a company linked to an outbreak as confidential commercial information unless a recall attaches to it. No recall, no name. The second hole is the store list. Even when there is a recall of an FDA-regulated food, publishing the stores that received it is a matter of agency discretion under a 2020 guidance, not a rule. And because these wraps were “proactively removed” rather than recalled, there is no recall to classify and no consignee list to publish under either agency’s practice. A family that ate a chicken wrap in September cannot learn whose it was or where it was sold.

The first petition: the name of a company whose food made people sick is not a trade secret.

The outbreak firm disclosure petition asks FDA to amend its disclosure regulations, 21 CFR part 20, to say plainly that the name and location of a firm implicated in an outbreak by epidemiologic, traceback, laboratory or genomic evidence is not confidential commercial information. It asks that the rule be written with the exception closed, so that a firm that wants its name withheld has to prove, on the record, why. It reaches the whole supply chain, the grower, the processor, the manufacturer, the distributor and the retailer, because in a produce outbreak there is often no brand to name at all. It asks FDA to publish what it knows while an investigation is open: the suspect food, the states, the hospitalizations, the cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, and in a multi-ingredient product like this one, the ingredient under investigation. And it asks FDA, in a joint file like #1421, to coordinate with FSIS so that what the public learns about one outbreak does not depend on which agency regulates the finished food.

FDA does not need new legislation to do any of this. Section 705(b) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act lets the agency disseminate information about food in situations involving imminent danger to health, and its last sentence says that nothing in it prohibits the Secretary from “collecting, reporting, and illustrating the results of the investigations of the Department.” That clause has no imminent-danger trigger. It reaches the results of an outbreak investigation after the product is gone, which is exactly when FDA has been saying it has nothing to report.

FSIS used to be the agency that named names. Not this time.

FSIS’s longstanding practice, when meat or poultry is implicated and no longer for sale, is to issue a public health alert that names the establishment. It did that as recently as May. When E. coli O157:H7 was linked to beef kofta served at The Kebab Shop, FSIS issued a public health alert naming the restaurant chain and the producer of beef that had been made in January and was no longer available. California alone reported nine cases, five hospitalizations and two cases of HUS.

The chicken wraps are FSIS-regulated. They are no longer for sale. Thirty-eight people are sick and an inspection is underway. There is no alert. When the agency whose routine is to name falls silent in a joint file with FDA, the problem is no longer one agency’s habit. It is the absence of a written standard that binds both.

The second petition: tell people which stores got the food, and close the “proactive removal” loophole.

USDA settled the consignee question by rule eighteen years ago. Under 9 CFR 390.10, when meat or poultry is recalled in a Class I recall, FSIS publishes the names and locations of the retail stores that received it. In 2011, Congress told FDA in the Food Safety Modernization Act to consult that policy and consider adopting it. FDA consulted it and, in November 2020, issued guidance saying it intends to publish store lists mainly when a food cannot easily be identified from its packaging and is still likely to be available for consumption. Guidance binds no one. And the second criterion, still available for consumption, means that a food already past shelf life, like these wraps, may never get a list even when it is recalled.

The recall consignee petition asks FDA to write the USDA approach into its own recall regulations: publish the store list in every Class I food recall, at the time the recall is announced, and extend it to restaurants, schools, hospitals and other institutions. It asks FDA to classify every recall within ten days and publish the interval. And, because of what happened this month, it now asks for one more thing.

FDA’s own recall regulation, 21 CFR 7.3, defines a “market withdrawal” as a removal involving a minor violation that would not be subject to legal action, or no violation at all. A ready-to-eat food that has made thirty-eight people sick is neither. The petition asks FDA to provide by rule that when a food has been identified as the suspected vehicle of an outbreak, its removal is a recall for purposes of classification and the store list, whatever the firm calls it and whether or not the product is still within its shelf life. A consignee requirement that attaches only to the word “recall” can be avoided by not using the word.

“Past shelf life” answers the wrong question.

FDA’s reason for saying nothing is that no one can buy the wraps now. That protects the next customer. It does nothing for the thirty-eight people already sick, or for the people who have not yet been counted, because E. coli cases take three to four weeks to show up on a federal table. A parent whose child ate a chicken wrap in September and now has bloody diarrhea needs to know the brand and the store, and needs to tell the emergency room, so the child is not given antibiotics or anti-diarrheals that raise the risk of HUS. A health department interviewing a patient needs to know which store to ask about. And if the contaminated ingredient went into other products, which is what both agencies now say they are investigating, the people eating those products need to know more than a category.

This is not new, and it is not just about wraps.

FDA closed a fourteen-person romaine E. coli outbreak, #1382, on September 10 and named no grower and no processor because the lettuce was past shelf life. It closed an eighty-nine-person romaine outbreak in late 2024 that hospitalized thirty-six people and killed one, and named no one; the traceback, it turned out, had converged on a single processor and a single grower the whole time. And FDA has named farms, processors and brands in exactly those circumstances at least eight times since 2006. What is missing is not authority. It is a rule.

FDA’s own 2026 record makes the point. In the Salmonella Newport outbreak linked to Guatemalan cantaloupe, seventy people in twenty-five states, FDA said the fruit was likely past shelf life. The importer, Ayco Farms, recalled a lot anyway, FDA put two growers on import alert, and all three were named. Four months later, romaine past shelf life got no recall and no name. The difference was not shelf life. It was whether a recall happened to attach. Even then, FDA’s executive summary of the cantaloupe outbreak redacts the states, and the closed-table row leaves the recall column blank.

And the chicken wraps are not the only open file without a name. As of October 7, nine of the fifteen active investigations on FDA’s table name no food at all. Those nine account for 619 sick people, and five of them are outbreaks the table still lists as ongoing.

Both petitions also support the citizen petition Stop Foodborne Illness filed in February asking FDA to stop treating company names as confidential. FDA told Stop in July that it had not been able to reach a decision. Thirty-eight more people are now waiting with them.

The produce industry should want this as much as consumers do.

When the government names a commodity and stops, consumers walk away from the whole category. In July, during the Cyclospora outbreak, Numerator data showed 6.5 million households stopped buying salad mixes and kits. Every grower and processor paid for that, including the ones who did nothing wrong. A firm-specific disclosure is the only thing that separates them. Today, “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps” puts every maker of chicken wraps in the country, and every supplier of whatever ingredient turns out to be the problem, under the same cloud.

Why hasn’t FDA or USDA named the company that made the chicken wraps?

As of October 8, 2026, neither agency has said. FDA says the wraps were removed from the market before the outbreak link was confirmed and are past shelf life, so there is no recall and no advisory. FSIS, which regulates the wraps, has not issued a public health alert.

What would the two petitions change?

The disclosure petition would make the name of a firm implicated in an outbreak public by rule, whether or not there is a recall, and would require FDA to publish the suspect food, states, hospitalizations and HUS cases while an investigation is open. The consignee petition would require FDA to publish the list of stores and institutions that received a Class I recalled food, and would treat the removal of an outbreak-implicated food as a recall even when the company calls it something else.