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The company was founded in 1995 in the Salinas Valley of California — often nicknamed the Salad Bowl of America for its fertile farmland — by Bruce Taylor, whose father and grandfather had also worked in the fresh produce industry.

Before founding Taylor Farms with a group of partners, Taylor also served as CEO of Fresh Express, a fresh produce brand later acquired by Chiquita Brands International.

Taylor still serves as the chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms.

Taylor Farms is a $7 billion enterprise, according to UC Berkeley, that employs more than 24,000 people and operates 22 production locations across North America.

Its retail, prepared foods, and food service divisions produce bagged salads, meal kits, fresh-cut vegetables, and other ready-to-eat foods.

The company and its network of growers provide an estimated 265 million servings of fresh produce across North America each week, the company said.

Taylor Farms introduced the first branded prepackaged chopped salads in 2012, per UC Berkeley.

The company later continued to expand through acquisitions, including the organic produce brand Earthbound Farm in 2019 and the packaged salad brand Eat Smart in 2021.

In April 2022, a fire broke out at Taylor Farms’ flagship facility in Salinas, California, destroying its 60,000-square-foot leafy-greens processing area

The facility was rebuilt shortly after the fire and reopened a year later, with a new design designed to process over 15 million pounds of produce weekly.

In 2013, restaurant-associated Cyclospora illnesses in Iowa and Nebraska were linked to salad mix produced by Taylor Farms’ Mexico division. During the multistate outbreak, 631 illnesses were reported across 25 states, although the CDC determined that the number of cases likely represented multiple outbreaks linked to different food sources.

Taylor Farms was also linked to an E. coli outbreak in 2024 involving slivered onions served on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. The company voluntarily recalled yellow onions supplied to McDonald’s and other food-service customers after 104 people were sickened across 14 states, 34 were hospitalized, and one died.

The FDA identified the recalled onions as the likely source of the illnesses.

The CDC and FDA said shredded iceberg lettuce served at some Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia was contaminated with Cyclospora.

As of July 16, the five-state outbreak included at least 1,644 confirmed illnesses, 94 hospitalizations, and no deaths. Not every Taco Bell restaurant in the affected states received the implicated lettuce.

The FDA’s traceback investigation identified a single supplier that provided the restaurants with iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico. Federal officials did not publicly name the supplier, but Taylor Farms said FDA traceback pointed to a specific independent farm affiliated with the company.

Taco Bell said it removed potentially affected lettuce from restaurants in select states and was indefinitely removing the supplier’s lettuce from its nationwide supply chain.

On Friday, Taco Bell said in a public statement that it had completed the removal of all affected Taylor Farms lettuce from its restaurants.

The FDA is investigating whether potentially contaminated lettuce from the supplier remains on the market and whether it was distributed to other restaurants, retailers, brands, or businesses. Additional states could be added to the federal advisory as investigators learn more.

Taylor Farms de Mexico said it was voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the US market. The company said its Taylor Farms-branded salad kits do not contain iceberg lettuce.

The CDC is also investigating other clusters and thousands of additional reported Cyclospora illnesses that may not be connected to the lettuce served at Taco Bell. Health officials have warned that the nationwide increase in cases likely involves more than one source.

Car service to Charles De Gaulle Airport is included for La Première passengers, and I was able to schedule it in advance.

I was dropped off at a dedicated La Première check-in desk.

A couple of minutes after handing over my passport and checked bag, I was escorted through private security and whisked away in a Porsche to the flagship La Première lounge.

The lounge itself was huge but, in my opinion, a little underwhelming.

Nothing about the design stood out to me as being super special, aside from lots of red furniture and the Air France winged seahorse logo on the plates.

However, I appreciated the ample seating, and it was very quiet — not a huge surprise considering how few people fly La Premièr.

When ready to order food, I was instructed by a staff member to sit at one of the many empty tables with white tablecloths nearby.

Once I sat down, though, I had to ask for a breakfast menu multiple times and then flag down a server to order. I expected more attentive service given the high staff-to-guest ratio.

Food came out quickly, and croissants were sufficiently flaky, but the breakfast menu was pretty generic with eggs, cheese, charcuterie, and a very simple avocado toast. The wine glassware also looked surprisingly cheap to me, like something I might find at Ikea.

I regretted not having breakfast at The Peninsula Paris, the luxury resort I’d been staying at before coming to the airport.

The best part of my lounge experience was the complimentary 30-minute Sisley facial, which is offered to La Première passengers at Charles de Gaulle.

My aesthetician was lovely, and came to find me while I was eating breakfast when it was time for my appointment.

Although a 30-minute facial is not quite enough time for anything intensive, it was a very hydrating and relaxing facial massage with some manual sculpting. It was definitely ideal before a long flight with very dry airplane air.

I was glad I’d booked this in advance to ensure availability since there are limited spaces.

Once I checked in with La Première, it felt impossible to miss my flight or forget any belongings.

I had a personal escort drive me to the lounge, then collect me after my facial to drive me directly to the plane. I was the last passenger to board and the only passenger in La Première on this particular flight.

It was reassuring to know that even if I’d fallen asleep or completely lost track of time in the lounge, a personal handler would fetch me to ensure I made my flight.

Removing all of the stress of navigating an unfamiliar airport and keeping track of boarding time felt like a huge benefit of flying in La Première.

Each of the four suites has a wide seat with leather armrests and a footrest that could double as a smaller seat, so somebody could even sit across from me to dine.

I had so much legroom that I couldn’t even reach the wool-and-cashmere blanket that was left for me on my footrest when my seat was upright for takeoff.

There was plenty of space for me to work on my laptop, and a side table for placing items. I also had a table lamp with the winged seahorse logo for mood lighting if I wanted.

I was offered Jacquemus cotton pajamas in multiple sizes and provided a bright-red leather amenity kit, too.

The chic kit included a wooden comb, ballpoint pen, and eye mask, plus Sisley eye and lip balm, hydrating serum, antiaging cream, and hand cream.

Because I was the only passenger in La Première, the crew let me spread out across two seats, leaving one seat with my belongings for working and dining, while making up the seat across the aisle as a bed for me to sleep, with a thick mattress pad, pillow, and duvet blanket.

This really enhanced my experience, and I didn’t see anyone except for two flight attendants the entire flight, so it honestly felt like flying private.

Floor-to-ceiling curtains separate each suite, although I only closed mine when I was sleeping since I already had the entire cabin to myself.

This is the most comfortable bed I’ve experienced on a plane, and the plush mattress pad really made a nice difference.

These seats are about 6 ½ feet long when fully reclined in lie-flat mode, and I’m sure taller folks would appreciate them.

The onboard bathroom didn’t feel any bigger or nicer than what I’ve seen in business or economy class. Since nobody else was using it, though, I didn’t need to worry about it being occupied.

There was no set time for meal service, and I could enjoy anything on the menu whenever I wished.

Several Michelin-starred chefs partnered with Air France for the La Première menus, including Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud.

On my flight, Anne-Sophie Pic (the world’s most Michelin-starred female chef) had designed the savory dishes, which included things like coffee-smoked beef filet, lobster and crab raviolo, and grilled chicken with sake lees.

I was also served a selection of warm bread paired with French Maison Bordier doux and demi-sel butters, and caviar as an amuse-bouche.

I selected the tomato tarte tatin with smoked vanilla and goat’s cheese as my appetizer, but felt it was a bit too mushy and not flaky enough on the edges.

However, my vegetarian main course, grilled artichokes with Comté cheese polenta, was absolutely delicious. The polenta was remarkably light and fluffy.

Cheese feels de rigueur on any Air France flight, but I was full and skipped that course and headed straight to salad and dessert.

I got a salad with a mustard vinaigrette, hard-boiled eggs, chopped chives, fennel, marinated mushrooms, and smoked chicken. The salad greens tasted very fresh, and I didn’t find a single wilted leaf.

Desserts on my flight were created by pastry chef Claire Heitzler, whom I was not previously familiar with, but am now a fan of.

I tried both of the ones available to me: a light apricot-and-almond dessert complete with a buttery sablé cookie, and a soft dark-chocolate cake that I sprinkled with a touch of sea salt to accent the chocolate flavors.

High-end ice cream by artisan ice-cream maker Philippe Faur and Pierre Hermé chocolates were also available to try, served alongside Illy coffee and Palais de Thés tea.

Denon noise-canceling headphones were provided in the seat compartment, and the 24-inch HD touchscreen looked super sharp.

The entertainment selection included a wellness section with guided meditation and soundtracks designed to help passengers fall asleep. I even found short seated-yoga videos, although I practically had enough space to do regular yoga in my suite if only I had a mat.

The movie selection included plenty of Hollywood blockbusters, dozens of French films, and a few different movies in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic, along with Bollywood and African films for a truly inclusive global repertoire.

I didn’t end up watching any movies because the included WiFi was excellent, fast, and easy to connect to in just a couple of clicks.

Instead, I mostly listened to Taylor Swift while eating, working, and drinking several glasses of Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle Champagne.

This is definitely the most luxurious experience I’ve had on a transatlantic flight, especially with the unexpected privacy I had as the only passenger in La Première.

I typically fly in business class, and this was definitely several steps up from that.

If I were to compare this to other first-class experiences I’ve had with airlines like British Airways, this one definitely feels superior. The top-notch food and comfort Air France offered here feels difficult to beat.

I’ve flown private on several shorter flights within the US, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and I’d say this comes close to that experience.

Still, all this luxury and exclusivity come at a high, sometimes five-figure price.

This class was fun to experience once, but in the future, I think spending the same amount of money on hotels and meals in Paris instead would be a better value. That way, I could sprinkle luxury throughout my trip instead of mostly enjoying it in the skies.

Business Insider reached out to Air France for comment.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who served as President Donald Trump’s first AI and crypto czar before moving in March to cochair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, called the release “concerning.”

In a Friday X post sharing the Arena leaderboard, Sacks said it was the first time a Chinese model had taken the top spot for frontend coding, with Kimi K3 also scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.

Sacks argued the US is hobbling itself in response: blocking new data centers, layering on state regulations, and pushing for federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. “This is how you lose the AI race,” he wrote, warning that the rest of the world won’t play by America’s rules if it bogs itself down.

“Permissionless innovation” is how America won the internet, Sacks said, adding that the US can win in AI while addressing risks in a targeted way, “or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.”

In response to Sacks’ analysis of Kimi 3 on X, the billionaire Khosla Ventures founder, Vinod Khosla, said he agreed and highlighted what he called “an even bigger issue”

“Agree, 100% we shouldn’t be tying ourselves in knots,” he wrote on X. “Even bigger issue is the brilliant talent we are scaring away from other countries with our immigration policies for great talent.”

The Trump administration has moved to tighten immigration restrictions, including for student visas. Last year, Silicon Valley was rocked when the government introduced a $100,000 fee for employers sponsoring some new H-1B applications for foreign workers. The ruling was later struck down by a federal judge and remains in litigation.

In May, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services memo implied that people who could previously apply for a green card from inside the US may now have to leave the country while their case is being processed.

And just this week, the administration introduced a new rule that puts an expiration date on how long people on student visas can initially stay in the US.

Aaron Levie said the release was a “huge win” for companies building on AI.

In an X post on Thursday, the Box CEO congratulated the Kimi team and said it was “truly wild” to see this level of performance from open models, pointing to Kimi K3’s third-place ranking on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index — behind only Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

Levie argued that cheaper frontier-level intelligence directly expands what enterprises can do with AI. There’s a large backlog of workflows companies would love to automate, he said, held back only by token costs.

Ethan Mollick offered “a note of caution” amid the hype.

The Wharton professor, who studies AI’s effects on work, took to X to say Kimi K3 “messed up in a bunch of ways” when he asked it to perform a complex statistical audit of some of his prior academic work, including misapplying statistical methods.

Mollick shared a detailed critique of K3’s audit — generated, notably, by OpenAI’s rival GPT-5.6 Pro model — that identified errors in the audit’s core statistical approach. Mollick said he agreed with the critique.

Venture capitalist and “All-In Podcast” cohost Jason Calacanis said the pace of AI progress is accelerating, and made some bold predictions.

“It’s happening folks,” Calacanis wrote on X, sharing an Arena leaderboard showing Kimi K3 ranked first for frontend coding, ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

He argued the field has moved faster in the last 30 days, across a dozen players, than in the previous year, with open-source models “compounding” while frontier labs refine.

Calacanis predicted things will “get wild” when open-source AI reaches robotics, self-driving, and life sciences, and said that 2026 will be the year of AGI, with superintelligence following in 2027 or 2028.

“ITS GONNA GET VERY STRANGE,” he wrote.

Russ Salakhutdinov, the CMU professor who co-advised Moonshot founder and CEO Yang Zhilin’s Ph.D., called the release “a huge win for the open-source community.”

In an X post, Salakhutdinov congratulated his former student, resurfacing a 2019 post celebrating Yang’s thesis defense.

Yang completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in just four years, during which he contributed influential research, including Transformer-XL and XLNet, which helped shape the architecture of modern language models.

“It feels like just yesterday Zhilin was graduating from my lab at CMU,” Salakhutdinov wrote, thanking Yang and the Kimi team “for everything you’re doing for the open-source community.”

Gary Marcus, a longtime critic of the AI industry’s economics, had a blunter reaction.

“Congress should investigate. Seriously,” Marcus wrote on X, quoting a Goldman Sachs chart showing capital expenditure for major US cloud providers projected to reach roughly $1 trillion in 2027, about eight times the projected spending of their Chinese counterparts.

Gavin Baker, a prominent investor and one of Wall Street’s leading voices on the AI industry, called the release of Kimi K3 an “inflection point” for AI.

He said Kimi K3 is bad news for closed AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, but is a net positive for just about every other company in the world.

“Anything that lowers margins and increases competition at the model layer is good for every other AI layer: power, semiconductors, hyperscalers, neoclouds and yes even software,” Baker wrote on X.

Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official whom OpenAI hired as its head of strategic futures, a role that puts him in charge of developing frontier AI policy proposals, said Kimi K3 was a “good model” and that he was suprised it was open source.

“I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks,” he wrote on X. “To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it.”

He wanted to say that China’s open-source strategy aligns with segments of its political philosophy.

“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,'” he wrote.