Irvine’s Taco Bell Recalls Its Plastic Bicycle Bottles : Safety: Children have pulled the tops of the containers off and tried to swallow them. The firm was selling the neon-color bottles for 99 cents each in a campaign featuring pro racer Greg LeMond.

Taco Bell began a voluntary recall Friday of 300,000 plastic water bottles being sold as promotion items after receiving reports that they pose a risk to small children, who could pull out and possibly choke on the small, movable tops.

The recall began after Irvine-based Taco Bell and the bottle’s manufacturer, Specialized Bicycle Components of Morgan Hill, told the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission about the potential hazard.

On Thursday, Taco Bell halted sales of the brightly colored sports bottle after receiving reports of three incidents in which children had pulled off the tops--similar in design to the top on a bottle of dishwashing liquid--and tried to swallow them.

In one case, Specialized Bicycle officials said, a parent performed the Heimlich maneuver on a child who had started to choke on the top, which was stuck in his windpipe. In another, a top was removed from the child’s mouth before he choked.

Company officials declined to detail the incidents, which occurred in the Midwest.

The sales halt came just three days after Taco Bell had started selling the neon-color bottles for 99 cents each as part of a $12-million “tacos to go” ad promotion featuring professional bicycle racer Greg LeMond. The bottles were being sold at 2,700 U.S. Taco Bell outlets.

Taco Bell said that it had ordered 2.5 million of the bottles for the campaign but that just 300,000 had been sold as of Thursday. Taco Bell spokesman Elliott Bloom said the bottles can be returned to Taco Bell for a full refund.

Specialized Bicycle, the nation’s largest maker of bicycle water bottles, has produced more than 10 million of the containers in the last decade without reported risk or injury, company spokesman Ken Brenner said.

The company has stopped production and distribution of the bottle because of the Taco Bell recall, he said, although it is still being sold through bicycle shops and other speciality retailers.

The bottle is made up of a main container, a cap and a small mouthpiece closure top, called a poppet, which is pulled with the teeth as a person is riding a bicycle.

Bloom said the poppet is designed to come off altogether with a hard pull so the bottle can be cleaned. But this feature also poses a potential choking hazard to children, Taco Bell said in a statement warning parents to keep young children away from the bottles.

Bloom said company officials worked through the night Thursday to make a presentation to the consumer commission. By law, companies are required to notify the agency in a timely manner when they suspect that a product is hazardous, commission spokeswoman Anne L. Pavlich said.

“We went to the commission as soon as this thing was reported to us,” Bloom said. “We became very concerned there was a potential safety problem.”

Alan Schoem, director of the division of administrative litigation for the commission, said Taco Bell decided that “since it was being sold in a fast-food restaurant, it was more likely that children would have access” to it.

He added that it “might be a different story in a bicycle shop or sport shop,” which caters primarily to adult customers.

Specialized Bicycle is “doing the research and the inquiries into the problem” before deciding whether to remove or repackage the bottle for sale at retail stores, Brenner said.

The company may add a safety sticker or redesign the bottle, he said, adding that company officials “do not want to have a product out there with a potential danger. They have stopped all production and distribution and are doing research into solving the problem.”

Besides producing millions of the bottles for the fast-growing bicycle market, the bottles have also been used as promotion items in other ad campaigns, such as one for Gatorade Thirst Quencher, Brenner said.

Fred Clements, a spokesman for the National Bicycle Dealers Assn., a trade group based in Costa Mesa, said Specialized Bicycle is known as the biggest U.S. maker of water bottles.

“I have never heard of a problem (among bicycling enthusiasts) with their bottles,” Clements said.

Times staff writer John O’Dell contributed to this article.