Daily Harvest sickened customers, trying for a comeback

When influencer Abby Silverman first tried Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles, a meat substitute marketed as a “groundbreaking,” last June, she ended up in the Emergency Room.

“I started having extreme stomach and gastro-pain. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me,” Silverman shared in a widely viewed TikTok panning Crumbles and Daily Harvest — the health food company that has a slew of celebrity investors behind it, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams and Bobby Flay.

She was not alone. In a Reddit thread, she discovered that numerous others had also been suffering from debilitating stomach pain, fevers and vomiting — and worse.

Now, more than a year later, the company is planning a comeback, expanding to grocery stores for the first time, even as it faces more than 300 lawsuits from people claiming they were poisoned by the exotic tara flour used in the crumbles.

Its flatbreads, smoothies and Harvest Bowls are hitting the freezer aisle at more than 1,100 Kroger stores and Kroger’s subsidiaries.

Daily Harvest was founded by Rachel Drori, a former marketing executive at online shopping group Gilt, in 2015. It quickly became trendy with its A-List backers and ready-to-blend smoothies, parfaits, grain bowls and soups loaded with “superfoods.”

The company went on to gain 100,000 subscribers nationwide. In 2017, it raised $43 million in venture capital, some of it from M13, the venture capital company co-founded by Carter Reum, Paris Hilton’s husband.

By 2021, the company was valued at more than $1 billion, making it one of a handful of “healthy” food companies to reach unicorn status.

But then in 2022, it faced a major crisis, which even impacted influencers it was hoping would promote its foods on their social media accounts.

Content creator Luke Wesley Pearson, who was gifted a package with the Crumbles by its public relations arm, reported in an Instagram video labeled “Important PSA” that he needed gallbladder removal surgery after digesting the alt-meat.

“I had to have an organ removed my life is changed forever because of this,” he claimed in a post.

Daily Harvest received reports of 470 bouts of illness or adverse reactions. It issued a recall of the Lentil Crumbles on June 23, 2022.

A backlash ensued on social media and some criticized Daily Harvest’s handling of the crisis.

“Offering refunds???? You need to pay every single victim’s hospital bills and pay them for their troubles,” one commenter wrote on Daily Harvest’s Instagram.

The direct-to-consumer business suffered. According to data from research firm Earnest Analytics published by Fast Company, the number of accounts plummeted 38% from June 2022 to May 2023, and revenue plunged 33%.

Daily Harvest disputes these statistics, saying they do not reflect its subscriber base and revenue figures. The company says its customers’ average order value was up double digits in May this year on the same month last year, before the recall, and that revenue per customer is also higher.

Daily Harvest launched an investigation with the FDA, CDC, doctors and independent labs. Testing ruled out processing issues or food-borne bacteria such as listeria and E. coli, typically the cause for most food recalls.

“Nothing indicated that there were any issues within safety,” Ricky Silver, chief supply chain officer at Daily Harvest, told The Post.  

Instead, they found the ingredient tara flour – a high-protein flour derived from the seeds of a tree in Peru – was the issue.

“Baikiain, a naturally occurring compound in tara, which was not previously reported or thought to cause adverse effects, appears to be the cause of the issues reported with the French Lentil + Leek Crumbles. The adverse effects appear to be experienced by only some people, likely the result of a genetic predisposition which was not previously medically known,” Daily Harvest said in a statement on its website.

Professor Ben Chapman, a department head and food safety specialist for the Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences at North Carolina State University, told The Post it was a unique situation.

“Most of the time when we look at outbreaks that cause recalls, we can find a common pathogen or toxin – with this you couldn’t identify the issue,” Chapman said.

Daily Harvest has not used tara flour in any of its products since the recall, and says it will not be using the ingredient again.

The company told The Post that it has updated its sourcing approval strategy and will no longer use an ingredient if it hasn’t been widely tested and used in the U.S.

“Since [the recall] we have honed in on a few updates on our sourcing approval strategy… making sure we’re evaluating any past use both in scientific studies or other peer reviewed type spaces,” Silver said.

More than 300 people who got sick from the Crumbles have filed lawsuits against Daily Harvest, and the cases are currently pending.

Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs, said it became more clear that tara flour was the culprit when some people came to him getting sick from the meal delivery service Revive Superfoods, which also used tara flour.

He emphasized how seriously ill some of his clients allegedly became.

“To have this reaction where your liver goes haywire and you get your gallbladder removed, it’s more than an intolerance,” he told The Post.