Updated crisis playbook for navigating social media and AI when food safety issues strike.
Kate Finley is the founder of Belle Communication.
Another week, another food safety alert. With more than 1.2 million news articles covering the 300+ food recall and outbreak events from 2024, food safety has become a daily headline.
Our food isn’t necessarily more dangerous, but social media and AI have transformed how issues spread and how brands manage communications. For PR pros, that means the basics of crisis management still apply — show empathy, be transparent, take accountability, share clear remediation steps — but today’s environment demands faster execution, more visibility and algorithm-aware strategies.
Updated food crisis communication strategies
Communicators must juggle the speed at which misinformation can spread on social media and the influence of AI-driven search, where summaries often become the “public record” that consumers rely on.
Crisis management is no longer just about what you say, but how well your response is designed to be found and amplified across multiple platforms. To succeed, brands need strategies that anticipate how messages travel, how algorithms elevate information and how consumers engage.
Pre-crisis actions
- Social listening: Set “always-on” alerts tied to brand names, health terms, slang and visual cues like logos to catch mentions or misinformation early. Recommended tools include: Sprout Social, Talkwalker and Brandwatch.
- Establish social guidelines: Set clear escalation protocols for social media so action can be taken quickly and confidently. Define which comments to engage with, which ones to leave alone or take offline and how to handle sensitive information.
- Create a crisis toolkit: Have pre-approved templates, responsibility assignments, timelines, FAQ scripts and legal guidance ready in advance.
- Track AI visibility: Test to see current brand presence on AI platforms and generate needed content to establish a positive brand foundation. Recommended tools include: Bluefish, Kai and SEMrush.
Immediate response tactics
- Establish authoritative presence: Publish official press releases and videos on your website and engage reputable newswire services for maximum distribution and to influence the “summarized truth” AI systems will reference.
- Pause planned marketing: Audit scheduled content to determine if it may appear tone-deaf during a safety issue and outline what content is safe to continue.
- Address false claims directly: Counter social media misinformation empathetically and 1:1 with consumers, pointing them to helpful resources.
- Optimize for AI discovery: Use schema markup and key phrases on crisis-related web pages to increase visibility in search results and provide news media with timely updates.
Sustained communication efforts
- Create comprehensive resources: Develop FAQ-style content directly answering likely consumer queries (“Is [Brand] safe now?” “What corrective actions were taken?” “How are you preventing future issues?”).
- Stay relevant: Post timestamped and ongoing updates, as AI systems often prioritize recency in content retrieval.
- Leverage earned media: Prioritize securing news coverage highlighting corrective actions, safety improvements and consumer support programs, as AI heavily references news coverage in responses and favors trade media and national outlets like Business Insider, Axios, The New York Times and Reuters.
Long-term reputation management
- Dilute negative coverage: Publish thought leadership, CSR initiatives and product quality news to balance search visibility.
- Build content volume: AI’s reliance on message recency and volume means consistent, thoughtful communication across all channels is essential.
- Give consumers new reasons to care: Run promotions and ads that highlight positive messages and encourage visits/purchases.
- Continue monitoring: Social listening and AI-presence evaluations should continue so issues can be caught and addressed early.
Example: McDonald’s recall and digital brand rebuild
When McDonald’s faced an E. coli outbreak in 2024, it quickly restored consumer trust by using the above approaches across its digital channels.
Within hours of the CDC alert, McDonald’s enacted its recall plan and launched a dedicated webpage, Always Putting Food Safety First. The page was updated in real time with investigation news, safety assurances and an action timeline. Employing SEO best practices while also appearing on national TV and issuing statements to the media ensured that consumer searches surfaced McDonald’s corrective narrative rather than misinformation.
On social media, McDonald’s combined transparency with engagement. It promptly posted recall notices, answered customer questions with empathy, corrected misinformation and directed users to its FAQ. Social monitoring tools helped it respond swiftly to trending concerns, showing consumers individual care.
Once the issue was resolved, McDonald’s offered promotional deals to win back customers and ran ads highlighting value, quality and safety. By sharing its post-event recovery approach with news media, it further overcame negative coverage and reinforced confidence in the brand.
Just three months after the event, social media sentiment analysis showed that negative mentions of “McDonald’s E. coli” dropped sharply while positive mentions of McDonald’s value deals and campaigns spiked.
The path forward
The intersection of social media, AI and food safety communications represents uncharted territory for many PR professionals. While we can’t control every narrative thread, we can adapt our strategies to work with, rather than against, these new realities.
Successful food safety communication now depends on consistent, multi-channel communication that works with algorithms while still connecting with people.
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