Poor Taco Bell. And we mean it. This isn’t “snark.”
Millions of dollars and millions of hours of toil, good service to customers and overtime go into creating a top corporate image. And, sad but true, it can be quickly undone by news stories that raise fears or revulsion in consumers, particularly if coupled with slow or inadequate corporate crisis management.
And that’s what Taco Bell now is combating: headlines from coast-to-coast screeching about an E. coil outbreak linked to the restaurant that has spread to six states. The headlines have been as unhelpful to Taco Bell’s business as a finger fraudulently placed in a bowl of Wendy’s chili.
In the Wendy’s case, consumers made it clear that their love of “finger food” had limits, Wendy’s lost millions of dollars in business and the people who placed the finger there to try and sue the company are now in jail.
Taco Bell has yet another problem: its slogan.
It used to use the slogan “make a run for the border.” So Taco Bell has been associated with the word “run.” Now it’s associated with the image “runs.”
So the company is acting swiftly although some wonder if it’s too little, too late:
Taco Bell tried to assure its customers on Saturday that its food was safe.
After the fast food company came under investigation after an E. coil outbreak spread to six states, with many of the sick saying they had eaten at the restaurant, Taco Bell announced it has conducted independent lab tests on numerous samples of ingredients used at its restaurants across the country.
Taco Bell says the tests determined the ingredients are not contaminated with E. coli. The one possible exception is green onions, which were removed from the restaurants on December 6.
Taco Bell pulled the tangy vegetable from its 5,800 restaurants nationwide on Wednesday after preliminary tests showed scallion samples contained the strain.
Green onions served in the restaurant chain’s Mexican-style fast food in the eastern United States are suspected as the source of dozens of cases of sickness over the past two weeks.
The onions came from the seaside region around Oxnard in Southern California. The latest E. coli outbreak followed a similar scare in supermarkets in September that was eventually tied to spinach grown in California’s Salinas Valley.
n a statement, Taco Bell declared its food safe after other ingredients on its menu were tested negative for E. coli 0157:H7 by an independent testing laboratory in New York.
The Irvine, California-based unit of Yum Brands Inc. (YUM.N: Quote, Profile , Research), said the testing involved more than 150 samples of ingredients served in its restaurants.
“I can reassure you that every Taco Bell is safe and strict standards are being upheld at all of our restaurants,” Taco Bell Corp. President Greg Creed said in the statement. “We will be working quickly to reopen our closed restaurants.”
The company said it had no plans to sell green onions again. Earlier preliminary test results of green onions were “presumptive positive” for E. coli, which prompted the company to remove them from its restaurants as a precautionary move.
Taco Bell’s corporate office had closed some restaurants, sanitized them and restocked them with food. But it still seems as if in terms of financial fallout, the company has bought “the whole enchilada.”
A lawyer who specializes in food borne illness litigation has already set up FAQs to answer questions for those who want to sue Taco Bell due to the food. And shares of Taco Bell parent Yum Brands Inc have fallen on the stock exchange.
It is, in short, a corporate headache. So has Taco Bell responded well? Time Magazine says no:
Taco Bell’s attempt at damage control needs damage control. The fast-food chain has responded poorly to this week’s E. coli outbreak, experts say, and its bad public relations could hamper Taco Bell’s efforts to reassure its customers….
…aco Bell’s president, Greg Creed, has posted three short statements on the restaurant’s web site since the outbreak was linked to the chain on Monday. Even those written statements were late in coming, says Timothy Coombs, a crisis management expert at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Ill. “The story broke Monday morning and Taco Bell did not have anything up until later that evening,” Coombs says. “People were looking for information online and there was nothing there.”
Creed should have held a news conference or made himself immediately available to reporters, says Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management, a California-based consulting group. But the president has yet to do so, even as new cases of E. coli are reported. “Taco Bell is hiding behind the written word,” Bernstein says. “The moment there is a threat to health or safety, that mandates the involvement and personal presence of the company’s president. This action communicates to the public that the company cares and it ensures stakeholders that the company is doing the right thing.”
Taco Bell may have also confused the public by closing and then reopening restaurants, even though the source of the contamination is still unknown. “Some would say that was a sign of being proactive: closing the store in order to protect the consumer,” says Steven Fink, president of Lexicon Communications Corps, the nation’s oldest crisis management firm. “But then Taco Bell reopened the stores and nothing had changed. Why did they close the stores and then reopen them? That sends a mixed signal that the company doesn’t have a handle on what’s going on.”
Time quotes an expert as noting five elements of good crisis management — and finds Taco Bell’s response deficient.
It also notes that the case of the finger in Wendy’s chili turned out to be a hoax.
Taco Bell’s case isn’t turning out to be a lot of crap — in one sense, that is…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.