Ringing the Taco Bell

Taco Bell Corp. (Irvine, Calif.) has launched an advertising blitz and sent its president on a string of media interviews to persuade customers that its food is safe and that the cause of last week’s E. coli outbreak – which has been linked to the fast-food chain — remains a mystery.

In an open letter to customers published in USA Today, The New York Times and other newspapers, company president Greg Creed said he would support the creation of a coalition of food suppliers, competitors, government and other experts to explore ways to safeguard the food supply chain and public health.

He said he had even assured his college-age daughter and her friends that Taco Bell food is safe. “I can assure you, I would not tell my daughter that unless I absolutely believed it,” Creed said.

“Based on the information we have today,” said Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch, “we believe that this issue is not isolated to Taco Bell and that there is more need to ensure a safe food supply from the farm to the table.”

The company provided no details about how an industry safety coalition might work.

Taco Bell, a subsidiary of Louisville, Ky.-based Yum Brands Inc., also ran ads in a number of papers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, where an outbreak of the bacteria has sickened 67 people who ate at the chain’s restaurants.

Poetsch said the company believes its food is safe because green onions were removed from use last week and restaurants have been sanitized. And no additional cases of Taco Bell patrons falling ill with E. coli have been reported since Dec. 2, 2006, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

But the FDA said it could not confirm that scallions were the cause of the problem, as previously suspected, and that it was not ruling out any food as a possible culprit.