Some Olive Garden locations quietly pulled their signature unlimited salad, and even certain soups, from the menu over the weekend as a parasite outbreak linked to bagged lettuce spreads across more than 30 states.
Self-described Olive Garden employees took to Reddit to describe the sudden changes. One posted Saturday afternoon that staff had been told Friday morning at 9 a.m. to stop serving salads and throw away all boxes of lettuce on hand. Hours later, the same location reportedly went further, pulling all soups except zuppa Toscana and halting broccoli service as well.
The moves come as roughly 5,000 Americans have fallen ill with Cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection that causes severe gastrointestinal symptoms including watery diarrhea, cramping, and nausea. In a normal year, the CDC records between 200 and 1,000 cases total. This outbreak has already blown past that figure several times over.
Olive Garden's parent company has not publicly confirmed a chain-wide directive. The U.S. Sun reached out to Olive Garden for comment but received no response before publication. The outlet did, however, confirm directly with one location that it had stopped serving salads over the weekend. That location has since resumed salad service, but switched from pre-bagged lettuce to receiving whole heads and cutting them in-house.
A separate location confirmed to The U.S. Sun that it is not serving minestrone soup right now.
The response appears uneven. One Reddit user in Orlando posted that salads were still being served at their local Olive Garden without interruption. On Threads, another customer wrote that the chain was "protecting us" by withholding salad and added, "Fine by me!"
At the location where salads were pulled, a self-described employee said hosts informed guests before they were seated. The impact on business was modest, at least initially.
The employee wrote on Reddit:
"Our hosts are informing guests before seating, surprisingly we only had about 40 people all day yesterday that opted to not be sat."
The FDA and CDC traced a potential link between the outbreak and Taylor Farms, one of the largest produce suppliers in the country, which employs about 25,000 people. Taylor Farms voluntarily recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico. But just days later, federal investigators walked back their claim connecting the company to the outbreak, without a detailed public explanation of why.
That reversal left restaurants, suppliers, and consumers in limbo. It has not been confirmed who supplies Olive Garden's lettuce, so it remains unclear whether the chain's bagged lettuce came from Taylor Farms or another source. The gap matters: without knowing the supply chain, individual locations appear to be making their own calls about what to serve and what to pull.
For Olive Garden, this is not the first brush with the parasite. In 2013, Taylor Farms salad mixes supplied to both Olive Garden and Red Lobster were linked to hundreds of Cyclosporiasis illnesses across the country, CBS News reported at the time.
Cyclosporiasis spreads through food or water contaminated with the Cyclospora parasite. The infection is not spread person to person, but contaminated produce can sicken large numbers of people quickly once it enters the supply chain. Five thousand cases across more than 30 states represent a serious nationwide food-safety failure, one that dwarfs the typical annual count by a factor of five or more.
So far, Taco Bell is the only restaurant the FDA and CDC have named in their investigation. Olive Garden has not been formally named. But the chain's own locations are clearly acting as though the risk is real, pulling menu items and discarding inventory without waiting for corporate to issue a public statement.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. Was the salad halt a coordinated internal decision or a patchwork of local managers reacting on their own? Which supplier provides Olive Garden's bagged lettuce? And why did federal investigators publicly link Taylor Farms to the outbreak, only to reverse course days later without a clear explanation?
Olive Garden's corporate silence does not help. When your employees are posting on Reddit before your communications team responds to a reporter, the chain of accountability is running in the wrong direction.
Five thousand Americans got sick. The least they deserve is a straight answer about what went wrong, and who is responsible for making sure it does not happen again.