Listeria outbreak - Jensen Farms cantaloupe (2011)
Jul 2011: a documented market event that overlapped the wholesale price windows of 1 tracked ingredient — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
What happened
CDC and FDA investigated a multistate Listeria monocytogenes outbreak linked to whole cantaloupes from Jensen Farms of Holly, Colorado. Contaminated melons shipped from July 29 through mid-September 2011 to at least two dozen states; Jensen Farms issued a recall on Sept 14, 2011. CDC's final tally was 147 confirmed illnesses and 33 deaths across 28 states, among the deadliest US foodborne-illness outbreaks on record.
Documented account from our open, cited registry (sources below). Shown as context beside the price record — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
Affected ingredients
Why these ingredients were exposed
Each affected ingredient's public supply structure — where it comes from and how much it leans on imports. Context that makes the co-occurrence with a documented event legible, never its cause.
- CantaloupeImport-exposed its import value concentrates in a few origins (58% Guatemala · 21% Mexico, HHI 0.41, a value share), at ~41% reliance by value. That is why an event in that origin region overlaps its price window legibly.
Reliance is a share of import value, a rough exposure proxy, not a supply-security score; origin concentration (HHI) is of import value, not total supply. It explains why an ingredient sits in the path of a documented event — not that the event caused any price move. Co-occurrence in time, never a cause.
The detected moves that overlapped
Each figure is a wholesale reference against its own ±26-week normal — a market move, never a delivered price.
No sustained wholesale move in our detected set falls inside this event's window. The event is documented; our public price series simply didn't flag a notable departure from normal for these ingredients then — an honest absence, not a hidden one.
What moved together
Co-occurrence, not cause
Cantaloupe
In Cantaloupe's 6 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:
Moving in the same weeks is not one thing causing another — many of these share a growing region, a shipping lane, or an aisle. It is a directed, bounded count: in K of an ingredient's own notable moves, another ran the same way.
Sources
3 sources
- Multistate Outbreak of Listeriosis Linked to Whole Cantaloupes from Jensen Farms, Colorado — U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Jensen Farms Cantaloupe Listeria Outbreak - Timeline — U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Multistate Outbreak of Listeriosis Associated with Jensen Farms Cantaloupe - United States, August-September 2011 — U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (MMWR)
Documented events come from our open, cited registry (CC‑BY). Price moves are detected from public history (USDA/BLS/FRED) and shown as co-occurring context, never asserted as the cause. How events are picked.