Lettuce recall causes restaurants and grocery stores to take action

WINONA, Miss. (WCBI)- When planning your Thanksgiving meal, most people can’t live without the turkey

Others have to have their side salad to make the meal complete.

But this year an E. Coli contamination has some changing plans.

If you are a Caesar salad lover, you are out of luck this Thanksgiving.

Tuesday the FDA recalled all romaine lettuce causing grocery stores and restaurants to change their holiday plans.

For the second time this year, the FDA has warned people to stay away from Romaine Lettuce due to E. Coli contamination.

And grocery stores went right to work.

“We pulled all of our Romaine actually clean the shelves that it was on their procedures in place they have what we call a cool label and they will narrow this down, and they’ll find it pretty quick that’s country of origin, and they’ll find it pretty quick,” said David Blaylock.

It’s not just grocery stores being affected. Restaurants are looking at some loss in profit.

“You would just have to change and what you would lose like today a lot of folks are losing a lot of money, but they have to get back from their vendors and everything that I don’t have to deal with,” said Kevin Ballard.

Kevin Ballard has seen this story happen to many times. He had already pulled romaine from his menu before this recall happened.

“So we don’t use it because of the issues that of happened in the past like last year they had a recall and I came from the grocery business knowing that remaining usually has issues, so we just don’t use Romaine lettuce. I just stay away from it it’s easier you don’t have to you know the iceberg lettuce and even the leaf lettuce they had of had to issues like Romaine has even though remain is what most people want,” said Ballard.

And with Thanksgiving only a day away people are having to make do with the alternatives.

“You may have to change their salad plans a little bit, but there’s different kinds of lettuce out there,” said Blaylock.

If you do have romaine lettuce already in your house grocery stores are ready to help you out.

“You need to bring it back to the store they will get a full refund or even throw it away especially don’t eat it,” said Blaylock.

The FDA is encouraging people to clean and sanitize your refrigerators if you had romaine lettuce.