By Eugenio L. Mancini, Jr. — Drazen Mancini, P.A., Boca Raton
If you have been following the reports about Cyclospora and shredded lettuce, you have seen the pattern that follows almost every food-safety story. A restaurant is named. A supplier is investigated. The case count climbs, and somewhere in the coverage a reader who actually got sick last week is left with the only question that matters to them: can I do anything about this, and how would I ever prove it?
That is the question this article is about. Not the headline. The proof.
As of July 16, 2026, the CDC and FDA were investigating a cyclosporiasis outbreak tied to shredded iceberg lettuce served at some Taco Bell locations, with 1,644 people reporting exposure across five states: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. Ninety-four people were hospitalized. No one died. Florida is not on that list, and no lettuce was recalled; Taco Bell voluntarily pulled the product while the FDA traced it back to a single supplier. Those are the facts the agencies have confirmed, and they are worth stating plainly, because the gap between “an outbreak was announced” and “a specific person has a case” is exactly where most people get lost.
Here is the part the news does not cover. Getting sick is not the same as having a claim. The hard part of a food-poisoning case is almost never proving that you were ill. It is proving what made you ill.
Getting sick and having a claim are two different things
Every year in this country, roughly 48 million people get a foodborne illness, about 128,000 are hospitalized, and around 3,000 die, according to the CDC. A very small fraction of those illnesses ever become a legal claim. That is not because lawyers turn the cases away. It is because the evidence is fragile, and it disappears fast.
Florida law does not ask you to be a detective. To win a negligence case against a restaurant, you have to show duty, breach, causation, and harm, and on causation a Florida court will ask whether the food “more likely than not” caused your illness. In Martinez v. Lobster Haven (Fla. 2d DCA, 2021), the court confirmed that a plaintiff does not have to rule out every other possible explanation, and does not always have to name the exact pathogen, to get to a jury.
But “more likely than not” is a real burden, and it is where honest cases fall apart. A lot of what people call food poisoning is not traceable to a single meal. Norovirus spreads person to person. Some bugs have an incubation period of days, which means the last thing you ate is rarely the thing that made you sick. Your symptoms could have come from a meal at home, from travel, or from a coworker. Timing alone does not establish a source, and any lawyer who tells you otherwise is setting you up to lose. The restraint is the point. A case that acknowledges the alternatives is a case a jury can believe.
How a stomach bug becomes provable
So what turns a bad night into a provable claim? Usually, the public-health investigation does.
This is the piece almost no one understands. When you report an illness to your county health department, that report is not primarily for your lawsuit. It exists so epidemiologists can spot an outbreak and stop it. The litigation value is a byproduct. But that same investigation builds, in real time, the exact record a civil case later depends on.
Walk through how the current lettuce investigation was actually built, because it is a map of what proof looks like. A laboratory has to confirm the specific organism; Cyclospora is a parasite, not a bacterium, and the CDC notes it does not show up on a routine stool test, so a clinician has to order the right one. Once cases are confirmed, investigators compare them. In bacterial outbreaks, laboratories fingerprint the organism through whole-genome sequencing and look for a match across patients. They line up incubation periods against what each person ate. Then they trace the common item backward through the supply chain. In the lettuce investigation, the FDA’s traceback pointed to one supplier, and a state analysis in Michigan found that of 190 confirmed Taco Bell cases, ninety percent had eaten iceberg lettuce.
Read that sequence again, because it is the whole game: a confirmed pathogen, a strain shared among the sick, a timeline that fits, and a documented path back to a common source. When those line up, an individual illness stops being “I think it was the tacos” and becomes evidence. When they do not, there is usually no case, no matter how sick someone was. That is why some outbreaks generate significant litigation and thousands of other illnesses never generate any. An outbreak does not create a lawsuit. It creates evidence, and evidence is what a claim is made of.
One contaminated meal can involve more than the restaurant
People picture a food-poisoning case as one plaintiff against one restaurant. The reality is usually a chain: a grower, a processor, a distributor, and the restaurant that served the plate. Florida law reaches different links in that chain through different theories, and the practical question underneath all of them is simple: who actually pays.
Start with the restaurant. Under Florida’s Uniform Commercial Code, section 672.314, serving food for value is a “sale,” and every sale carries an implied warranty that the food is fit to eat. That matters because you do not have to prove the restaurant was careless to use it; you have to prove the food was not fit. Florida also lets injured consumers reach past the person who handed them the food. The state’s food-liability line, running back through cases like Cliett v. Lauderdale Biltmore and up to the Florida Supreme Court’s adoption of strict product liability in West v. Caterpillar Tractor Co. (1976), allows a defective, unreasonably dangerous product to be traced to the companies that made and sold it, not only the last one in the chain.
Reaching the national brand is harder than people expect. A franchisor is not automatically responsible for what happens inside a franchised location. Under Mobil Oil Corp. v. Bransford (Fla. 1995), holding the parent company liable takes more than a logo on the sign; it takes a showing that the company represented control over the operation and that the customer relied on it. And since Florida apportions fault severally under section 768.81(3), each defendant in that chain pays its own percentage and no more. Untangling who is responsible is not a formality. It is most of the work.
You do not have to look to the Midwest to see how contested this gets. In 2024, the FDA and CDC traced a multistate Salmonella outbreak, 551 illnesses across 34 states, to cucumbers grown right here in Palm Beach County, at Bedner Growers in Boynton Beach and Thomas Produce in Boca Raton. Lawsuits followed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court. And the Florida Department of Agriculture publicly pushed back on the FDA’s traceback. That is the reality of these cases. Even the agencies and the growers disagreed about what the evidence showed, which is exactly why the evidence, not the outrage, decides the outcome.
What Florida gives you, and the clock you are on
If the proof holds, Florida law is not stingy. You can recover economic losses such as medical bills and lost wages, and non-economic damages for the pain and disruption the illness caused. Punitive damages are a higher bar; section 768.72 requires clear and convincing evidence of intentional misconduct or gross negligence, the kind of ignored, known danger that goes well beyond an ordinary mistake in a kitchen.
Two Florida rules do the most to shape whether a case is worth bringing, and both changed recently. First, the deadline. Since House Bill 837 took effect in March 2023, the statute of limitations for a negligence injury is two years, under section 95.11(5)(a) — cut from the four years many older articles still quote. A warranty claim under the UCC can run longer, up to four years under section 672.725, but you do not want to bet a case on the longer clock. Second, fault. Under section 768.81(6), a person found more than fifty percent at fault for their own harm recovers nothing. In a food case, that can matter if, for example, a customer kept eating a dish that was visibly or obviously off.
Health-code inspections sit alongside all of this as evidence, not as a verdict. Florida’s Division of Hotels and Restaurants inspects licensed establishments one to four times a year under Chapter 509, and those reports — the ones behind the Palm Beach Post inspection database and WPTV’s recurring “Dirty Dining” segments, are public. A violation does not automatically prove a restaurant caused your illness. It is one piece of evidence among several, and it is most persuasive when it lines up with the lab work and the timeline.
If you think a restaurant made you sick
The most valuable things you can do happen in the first day or two, long before anyone calls a lawyer. They are also, not by coincidence, the things that build the record described above.
- Get medical care and ask about testing. A stool test is what converts “I felt terrible” into a confirmed pathogen. If you suspect a parasite like Cyclospora, say so, because it takes a specific test that is not part of the routine panel.
- Report it to your county health department. Do this for public-health reasons first. It is also how your illness gets linked to any larger investigation, which is often the difference between a case and a hunch.
- Keep the physical evidence. Save receipts, packaging, delivery records, and any leftover food, sealed, in the refrigerator. A lab can test food. Memory cannot.
- Write down the timeline while it is fresh. What you ate, when you ate it, when symptoms began, and who else got sick. Incubation periods are central to causation, and a contemporaneous note is worth far more than a reconstruction weeks later.
- Be careful what you post. A public play-by-play on social media can be pulled apart later. Say less online, and keep your records instead.
Why evidence disappears, and why speed matters
Now the uncomfortable part. The other side’s most important records are usually in the other side’s hands, and there is nothing that automatically stops the clock on them. A restaurant may discard the day’s ingredients, wash down the prep line, and let surveillance video overwrite itself on a thirty-day loop. Temperature logs and employee schedules go missing in the ordinary course of business.
Florida does not recognize a separate lawsuit for a business that loses this kind of evidence. What it offers, under Martino v. Wal-Mart Stores (Fla. 2005), is a remedy inside the case: where evidence that mattered is lost, a court can apply a presumption against the party that lost it, or impose sanctions. That remedy only helps if someone moves quickly to demand the records before they are gone. The single biggest advantage in a food-poisoning case is not a clever legal theory. It is getting a preservation demand in front of the right parties while the evidence still exists.
The bottom line
The reason to understand any of this is not the current lettuce investigation, which will be resolved and forgotten. It is that the next one works the same way, and so does the meal you ate last night. Food-poisoning cases are won and lost on epidemiology long before they are won and lost on law. The people who recover are almost always the ones who, without knowing it, preserved the proof early: they got tested, they reported it, and they kept what they had.
At Drazen Mancini, that is where we start on any food-illness case — with the lab work, the timeline, and how fast the other side’s records are disappearing, not with a promise about what your claim is worth before anyone has looked. If you or a family member became seriously ill after eating out in Palm Beach County and you want to understand whether the evidence supports a claim, you can reach our office in Boca Raton for a confidential consultation. We handle injury cases on a contingency basis, which means there is no fee unless we recover for you.
Eugenio L. Mancini, Jr., is a founding partner of Drazen Mancini, P.A., in Boca Raton (Fla. Bar No. 1015350), and represents people injured by others’ negligence throughout Palm Beach County. This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts.
Frequently asked questions
Can you sue a restaurant for food poisoning in Florida? Yes, if you can prove it. Florida lets an injured customer sue on more than one theory: ordinary negligence, and breach of the implied warranty that food sold for value is fit to eat under section 672.314. The hurdle is rarely the legal right to sue. It is proving that a particular meal, and not something else, caused the illness.
How do you prove which restaurant or food made you sick? Through the same evidence public-health investigators use: a laboratory-confirmed pathogen, a timeline that fits the illness’s incubation period, other people sickened by the same source, and, in larger outbreaks, a genetic match and a supply-chain traceback. A stool test and a prompt report to the county health department are usually the two most important early steps.
How long do I have to file a food-poisoning claim in Florida? For a negligence injury, two years from the date it occurred, under section 95.11(5)(a), following the 2023 change in House Bill 837. Many older articles still say four years. Do not rely on them. A separate warranty claim can run up to four years under section 672.725, but the safe assumption is the two-year deadline.
Who can be held responsible besides the restaurant? Depending on where the contamination started, the processor, distributor, or grower may share responsibility, and Florida law reaches them through product-liability principles the state adopted in West v. Caterpillar Tractor Co. The national brand behind a franchise is harder to reach; under Mobil Oil v. Bransford, that takes proof the company controlled the operation, not just licensing of its name.
Does a health-code violation mean the restaurant is liable? No. A Florida inspection violation is evidence, not a verdict. It can support a claim, especially when it lines up with lab results and a timeline, but on its own it does not prove that the restaurant caused a specific person’s illness.
Is it worth reporting my illness if I am not sure I want to sue? Yes, and for a reason that has nothing to do with a lawsuit. Reporting to the health department is how outbreaks get caught and stopped. If you later decide to pursue a claim, that same report is often what connects your illness to a broader investigation.
What does it cost to talk to a lawyer about a food-poisoning case? The consultation is confidential and free, and injury cases like these are handled on a contingency basis: the fee comes out of a recovery, and if there is no recovery, there is no fee.
