When a food service operation - whether a restaurant, a hotel, or the hot dog stand on the corner - makes customers sick, the effect compounds on the operation itself.
When customers fall ill because of something they ate, they have a Food Borne Illness (often abbreviated FBI). A location faulted with making customers sick deals with medical bills, the PR nightmare, and even more.
Financial Costs: That the sick customer will take his or her business elsewhere is easy to understand. But a sick (or upset) customer is likely to tell others about the experience, substantiated or not. Count on losing more business than just one person’s or family’s. In addition, your insurance goes up, training or retraining costs strain your budget, and the medical bills for those who are ill can go on and on. The overall financial burden can be staggering - to the point of breaking the average operation.
Emotional Costs: Although not always easily apparent, expect emotional costs when a customer becomes ill. A food borne illness can devastate the business owner or manager as well as the patron and family. Your customers trust you, and you care about your business. Your staff, too, pays an emotional price; it can be hard to come to work when you know your workplace has made customers sick.
PR Costs: The very word outbreak can kill a business’s reputation. It is applied when a number of people eat the same food, and two or more of them become ill with similar symptoms. The term can be very misleading to the general public (think of the movie Outbreak, in which thousands of people died). A newspaper headline reading, “Local Restaurant Cause of Outbreak,” can create a tailspin of damage that erases the business of even the largest restaurant or hotel chain.
To minimize the chance of an FBI outbreak, we recommend the following:
1. Take temperature logs of all coolers regularly.
2. Make sure any employee who is sick is not working with food (no exceptions).
3. Make sure all managers, chefs, and key managers understand - and are involved with - proper food safety procedures daily.
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Center for Foodservice Learning, LLC, helps restaurant operators, managers, and chefs know the best and most practical applications both for food safety and for other training topics in the restaurant business.
