The country’s ongoing cyclospora outbreak is changing a familiar part of corporate America: eating salad for lunch.
In July, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration linked a multistate cyclospora outbreak to iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and distributed by fruit and vegetable producer Taylor Farms. Since then, the kinds of salad-heavy restaurants that tend to appear on workplace desks around lunchtime have struggled.
Sweetgreen cut its full-year outlook on August 6, projecting declines in sales and foot traffic. Its market value is now approximately $700 million, as of Monday’s close, down from roughly $1.2 billion in late May. Chopt Creative Salad Co.’s foot traffic reportedly fell throughout mid-to-late July, according to data from location analytics firm Placer.ai. “People stayed away from us … for a while,” says Kelly Roddy, CEO of Saladworks’ parent brand Woworks. None of those three companies have been linked to the cyclospora outbreak.
Saladworks’ foot traffic is trending back upwards now, Roddy says. He declined to disclose specific figures. But anyone returning to their old lunchtime standbys is likely to find a different kind of restaurant waiting for them — one that seemingly highlights everything on the menu except traditional salads.
At Saladworks, “we switched our marketing immediately” to advertise protein bowls, soups and wraps, Roddy says. Sweetgreen is similarly promoting non-salad offerings like its own protein bowls, plates and wraps, CEO Jonathan Neman told CNBC Make It on Thursday. “We can’t just wait until people are, you know, ready to eat greens again,” said Neman.
The shift in marketing is significant. Before the outbreak, 69% of U.S. consumers said salads were a typical lunch for them, putting the menu item only behind sandwiches and wraps (77%) and pizza (71%), according to market intelligence firm Mintel Group’s U.S. Consumer Approach to Lunch Report 2025. Sweetgreen wasn’t the country’s only highly valued salad chain: Privately held competitor Just Salad reportedly raised funding at a $1 billion valuation in February 2025, for example. (Just Salad, which also has not been linked to the cyclospora outbreak, did not immediately reply to CNBC Make It’s request for comment.)
Some restaurants are still trying to take advantage of salad’s pre-outbreak popularity by redefining the term to omit lettuce, says Kenny Lao, principal at Culinary Task Force, a Los Angeles-based hospitality consulting service. “They’re leaning into more grain salads, like mixed-grain salads,” he says. “I’m seeing they’re leaning into crunchy salads, like either bean salads or cruciferous salads.”
Other restaurants that haven’t been linked to the outbreak are trying to revive salad’s reputation. Saladworks plans to heavily discount its salads once per week, and potentially add more non-salad items like smoothies to its menu, Roddy says. Sweetgreen is similarly using promotions to try drawing customers “back into restaurants,” Neman noted on Thursday.
Different types of businesses are wrestling with the same consumer concern, too. Dilip Rao, CEO and co-founder of New York-based corporate meal delivery platform Sharebite, says he’s fielded a growing number of requests from clients to alter their regular lunch orders by either removing or replacing lettuce. “We’ve seen that activity taper up ever since [the cyclospora outbreak started],” says Rao, whose company connects employers with local restaurants.
The changing consumer behavior may not be permanent, as some salad-focused chains are already recovering some of their mid-summer losses. Chopt’s foot traffic during the first full week of August was 4.7% below its average from the first half of 2026, an improvement from 11.3% below average in mid-July, according to Placer.ai data.
Eventually, once the outbreak is resolved, consumers will likely return to their usual lunch preferences, predicts Stephanie Mattucci, Mintel’s principal food and drink strategist. “I anticipate people going back to their regular habits, as we’ve seen with other outbreaks in the past,” she says.
— CNBC Make It’s Kamaron McNair contributed reporting.
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