Taco Bell's sales fell 4 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2025, according to Dagens Nyheter, after a foodborne illness outbreak tied to the chain's US restaurants sent more than 100 people to hospital in July.
The drop was steeper than the market had anticipated, the newspaper reports, citing the news agency Bloomberg. The outbreak was traced to pre-shredded lettuce contaminated with the parasite cyclospora, which caused severe stomach pain and diarrhoea among customers who ate at the Tex-Mex chain.
The company has since tried to win back diners with discount offers and advertising campaigns, including one featuring the American singer Olivia Rodrigo. Taco Bell also says sales recovered during September, Dagens Nyheter reports.
Why it matters
The numbers show how quickly a food safety failure can translate into lost revenue for a restaurant brand. A single contaminated ingredient — in this case a product supplied pre-chopped and served raw — was enough to affect more than a hundred people and dent a full quarter of sales at one of the largest fast-food chains in the United States.
The timing made the damage harder to absorb. The outbreak hit in July, at the height of the summer trading period, and the consequences were still visible in the quarterly figures published this week. For investors, the 4 percent decline is a reminder that reputational shocks in food service tend to arrive faster than any marketing response can offset them.
A supply chain problem, not a kitchen one
The outbreak's origin points to a vulnerability that sits upstream of the restaurant itself. Pre-shredded lettuce is prepared in bulk before it reaches individual locations, which means contamination introduced at that stage can be distributed widely before anyone notices a pattern of illness. Cyclospora is a parasite that is typically spread through food or water contaminated with infected faeces, and it is not killed by ordinary washing of produce.
That structure explains the scale: more than 100 hospitalisations from a single ingredient across multiple sites, rather than an isolated incident at one branch. It also explains why the response had to reach beyond store-level hygiene. The chain's problem was in what it was buying, not only in how it was handling food on site.
Dagens Nyheter does not report which supplier provided the lettuce, how many restaurants were affected, or what specific changes Taco Bell has made to its sourcing since July. Those details remain outside the reporting summarised here.
Discounts, a pop star and a September rebound
Taco Bell's recovery effort has leaned on the levers available to any consumer brand: price promotions and celebrity marketing. The chain rolled out discount offers and advertising campaigns, including one built around Olivia Rodrigo, according to Dagens Nyheter.
The company says the approach worked, at least in part. Sales rebounded in September, it reports — a sign that some customers returned once the outbreak receded from the headlines and the offers gave them a reason to come back.
Whether that rebound holds is a separate question from whether the quarter's overall decline was avoidable. A 4 percent fall across three months means the July collapse was severe enough to outweigh a stronger September, and it came in worse than analysts had forecast. The market, in other words, expected damage; it did not expect this much.
The episode also lands in a broader context of scrutiny on how large chains manage the ingredients they buy in prepared form. Pre-cut produce is efficient and consistent, but it concentrates risk at a small number of processing points. When something goes wrong there, the consequences are measured in hospital admissions and quarterly earnings at the same time.
Taco Bell has not disclosed the cost of the discounts and campaigns it used to draw customers back, and Dagens Nyheter's reporting does not quantify the financial impact beyond the sales figure. What is clear is the sequence: outbreak in July, sales decline across the quarter, recovery in September, and a marketing push built around promotions and a chart-topping collaborator.
The next signal to watch will be whether the September improvement carries into the fourth quarter, or whether the third-quarter shortfall proves to be the start of a longer slide in customer traffic.
