Taylor Fresh Foods has recalled twenty refrigerated grocery products made with fresh jalapeños that Coast Citrus Distributors imported from a grower in Sinaloa, Mexico, and then recalled for possible Salmonellacontamination. The company announcement is dated August 9, 2026, out of Salinas, California. The products went to retail distribution centers in twenty-six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin — and they carry Best If Used By dates up to and including August 16, 2026. That last detail is the one that matters most today. This is not an old recall of food already eaten. Much of it is still sitting in refrigerators with three or four days left on the date.

The stores that received it are Hannaford, Kroger, Stop and Shop, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods. Here is the full list as the company published it:

Consumers who have any of these products should throw them out and not eat them. Refunds are available at the store where the product was bought, and Taylor’s customer care line is 855-455-0098, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific. If any of this food was opened in your kitchen, wash and sanitize the counters, cutting boards and containers it touched, because Salmonella moves easily from a leaking tub of pico de gallo to the next thing set down beside it.

Read that table by the UPC and not by the brand. Only five of the twenty rows carry the Taylor Farms name, all of them at Target. One row is Private Selection at Kroger, two are Freshness Guaranteed at Walmart, one is a Trader Joe’s item, and eleven rows have no brand at all — the brand column simply says NONE. A shopper holding a tub of Spicy Jarlsberg Dip or a Whole Foods pico de gallo has no way to know Taylor Farms made it. The twelve-digit number under the barcode is the only reliable way to match what is in the refrigerator to what is on the list.

There is also an error in that table, and it appears in the company’s version and FDA’s alike. Two Whole Foods rows read Salsa Roja Medium 12 oz, UPCs 030223075639 and 030223075646. FDA’s own product photograph for 030223075639 is captioned Salsa Verde Mild. Someone standing at the refrigerator with a jar of green salsa is scanning a list that shows only red. Check the number, not the description.

Salmonella infection usually begins twelve to seventy-two hours after eating contaminated food, and symptoms typically last four to seven days — diarrhea that can be bloody, fever, cramping, nausea and vomiting. Children under five, adults over sixty-five and anyone with a weakened immune system are the ones who end up in the hospital, and in rare cases the bacteria enter the bloodstream and cause arterial infections, endocarditis, or reactive arthritis that outlasts the diarrhea by years. Anyone who has been sick after eating one of these products should call a doctor and ask specifically for a stool culture. Without one there is no way to know whether an illness belongs to this outbreak, and no way for a health department to count it.

The outbreak behind the recall is a large one. FDA and CDC have counted 345 people infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Javiana across twenty-seven states, with 36 hospitalizations and no deaths, and illness onsets running from June 19 to July 20, 2026. Of 191 people interviewed, 177 — ninety-three percent — ate at a Mexican-style restaurant before getting sick, and CDC has named Chipotle Mexican Grill and QDOBA among them. Chipotle switched jalapeño suppliers for affected stores on July 20 and QDOBA stopped serving jalapeños altogether on July 28. FDA’s traceback identified a common grower in Sinaloa as the likely source. That grower has still not been named publicly.

Credit where it is due to Taylor Farms on this one. The jalapeño is not its pepper. The company bought a contaminated ingredient like everyone else downstream of that farm, and the recalled items carry Best If Used By dates beginning August 7 — nearly three weeks after the last illness onset in the outbreak. These products were made after the last person got sick, and no illnesses have been linked to them. This is a precautionary recall of food built from the same grower’s peppers, published quickly and with real UPCs and date ranges a person can actually use, which is more than the importer at the front of this chain has managed.

The list keeps growing beyond these twenty items. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a public health alert on August 8 covering eighteen meat and poultry products made with the same jalapeños, fourteen of them out of four Taylor Farms plants. Whole Foods on August 12 recalled forty-three guacamoles, salsas, pico de gallos and prepared foods that its own store departments made with jalapeños from Coast Citrus, sold in twelve states and online. Costco, Albertsons, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Jewel-Osco, Publix, Brookshire’s and Stop & Shop have all posted notices of their own. Coast Citrus Distributors, the importer that brought the peppers into the country and whose recall set every one of these in motion, still has no public recall notice anywhere on FDA’s recall page.

Check the UPC. Keep the receipt. And if someone in the house has been sick, ask for a stool culture before the antibiotics start, because that laboratory result is the only thing that ties an illness back to the pepper.