Lettuce sales at Stew Leonard’s dropped 11% this week amid the multi-state food poisoning outbreak caused by shredded iceberg lettuce – prompting the grocery store chain to stock up on greenhouse-grown lettuce as an alternative for concerned customers, The Post has learned.
As of Friday, the New York metro chain said it was cutting back on its orders of bagged lettuce from brands such as Andy Boy, Dole and Fresh Express, which carry a mix of greens that typically include iceberg lettuce – even though they have not been implicated in the cyclospora outbreak that has hit over 30 states.
CEO Stew Leonard Jr. is putting a folksy touch on his bid to recoup lost lettuce sales — putting up signs at his eight stores that will say, “My wife eats lettuce twice a day. I’m only buying greenhouse-grown lettuce, Stew.”
The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers to avoid eating shredded iceberg lettuce from Mexico at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.
As the outbreak has dominated headlines this week — with some 7,000 infected people reporting explosive diarrhea, vomiting and bloating — consumers have avoided the lettuce aisle, industry experts say.
“People are calling in and reducing orders across the board because they think consumers won’t buy fresh produce,” Joelle Mosso of Western Growers, which represents produce growers in four states, told The Wall Street Journal.
In Michigan, which has seen the biggest cluster of cyclospora infections to date, authorities warned residents that bagged, prewashed salad kits were risky. The state health department said buying heads of lettuce and removing the outer leaves was safer.
Leonard’s greenhouse-grown lettuce comes from Little Leaf Farms, which markets its process as “hands-free growing” that relies on rainwater. His stores also sell a private-label package called Stew Leonard’s Organic Greenhouse-Grown Greenleaf Crunch, which is harvested in the Hudson Valley, according to the grocer.
Leonard believes greenhouse-grown produce is now a safer bet than mass-produced greens grown in fields since they don’t rely on water irrigation systems that could be infected with human feces, which has been blamed for the parasitic outbreak.
The FDA has not identified the supplier of the lettuce behind the outbreak, but the Washington Post reported Thursday it is Taylor Farms of Salinas, Calif.
The massive produce grower and processor did not return a request for comment.
On Thursday, Leonard was still weighing whether to promote greenhouse-grown brands in his store, concerned that it “might scare people,” he told The Post.
By Friday, he had made up his mind to promote the greenhouse-grown produce.
“Our lettuce sales continue to be negative today,” he said.