It’s not been the best of times for Subway, the sandwich chain.
Long-time spokesthingy Jerad was convicted for child porn, a customer in Oregon says he found a dead mouse in his sandwich, and a naked woman in Alaska destroyed a Subway in a drug-fueled rage.
A popular Waialua bakery has been fined $22,000 for allegedly selling food after it was ordered to close down by the Health Department and for failing to fix multiple food safety violations.
The state closed down the Paalaa Kai Bakery on Oct. 6, after several inspections found the establishment had failed to fix refrigeration problems.
The Health Department issued a red “closed” placard to the bakery, the first since the state launched a new eatery inspection program last year.
The bakery, located at 66-945 Kaukonahua Rd., might request a hearing to contest the fine. No one answered the phone at the bakery Tuesday.
A care home provider has been fined more than £14,000 after six elderly residents fell ill with food poisoning at its Southall home.
According to Ealing Council , Life Style Care plc, who operate the Grange Care Centre, in Adrienne Avenue, pleaded guilty to three offences at Ealing Magistrates’ Court on October 1 under the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) regulations.
The council said that on December 27 last year, six elderly residents fell ill with food poisoning after eating a puréed beef meal.
Following an investigation by Public Health England (PHE) and Ealing Council, samples from the residents showed traces of the bacteria Clostridium perfringens and its toxins, concluding that the meal increased the risk of being ill 48 times.
The council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for safety, culture and community services, councillor Ranjit Dheer said: “It is so important for businesses to remember that poor food hygiene can have real consequences for their customers.
“This awful case highlights how serious food contamination can be. Had this business reheated the food thoroughly and held it at the right temperature, the outbreak would not have happened.
The company was fined £3,500 for each offence, and order to pay a victim surcharge of £120 and Ealing Council’s costs of £3,795.17, coming to a total of £14,415.17.
Back in the day, we started a university newspaper called The Peak, and ran an advertising campaign called Pennies for the Peak, with number 99 Wayne Gretzky unofficially endorsing.
Now I find out there’s a chain of stores in the UK called 99p and they apparently suck at food safety.
The discount retailer will appear in court accused of failing to prevent mouse infestations and selling food “unfit for human consumption” in two of its Croydon shops.
Mouse droppings, dirt and rubbish were allegedly discovered by hygiene inspectors at town-centre branches of 99p Stores in North End and Church Street.
Their owner, 99p Stores Limited, based in Northampton, has been charged with ten counts of failure to comply with food safety regulation.
Canberra, the capital of Australia on a former sheep farm because Melboune and Sydney were playing poppy pants about who should host the capital, has decided that public disclosure of restaurant inspection information is too silly to pursue.
Toronto figured it out, so did LA and NYC, but not good enough for Canberra.
The territory’s Chief Health Officer, Paul Kelly, said there were a “range of reasons” behind the decision, but the government had decided there would be “better paths to follow to get the same outcome”.
“Just to be clear, the outcome is that we want the people of the ACT or people visiting the ACT to be confident when they go to a restaurant they’re eating safe food,” he said.
Dr Kelly said alternative measures, such as translating ACT Health materials into different languages, “seem to be bearing fruit.”
Bullshit. Kelly probably caved to restaurant interests, especially when he won’t explain what those alternative approaches are. Some of us publish in peer-reviewed journals, some pontificate and genuflect to their masters.
The Australian Hotels Association ACT welcomed the decision, saying that it was in part thanks to improving food safety in Canberra’s restaurants.
Canberra, you want to be known for having four Prime Ministers in five years, or you want to be leaders. Food safety is low-hanging fruit, get on with it (and my Brisbane Stars kicked your butt at the Coffs Harbour ice hockey tournament.
Grow a pair.
Tufail Khan, owner of Barakah Indian in Railway Terrace, Rugby, was first warned about the state of the kitchen in February when a council food safety officer carried out a routine inspection.
The kitchen’s sink and freezer were dirty, cobwebs and a broken pane were found in a window, wall tiles were missing and broken, and the wash basin in the staff toilet had no running hot water.
Drops of blood were on the kitchen floor, the waste pipe from the main sink was cracked and leaking dirty water on to the floor, wall tiles were still missing and the window pane remained broken.
In addition, records of the kitchen’s food safety management system were unavailable for inspection and the daily diary for food safety checks was blank – suggesting no checks had been carried out.
At a hearing at Nuneaton’s Warwickshire Justice Centre on Monday, Khan pleaded guilty to four offences under the Food Safety Act 1990.
In mitigation, 34-year-old Khan said following the inspection in February he had contacted a builder to make improvements to the kitchen, but the builder had been unable to carry out the work until a week after the follow-up inspection in April.
The court heard the improvements outlined in the council’s warning letter in February had now been made to the takeaway’s kitchen.
Magistrates fined Khan £500 for each offence and ordered him to pay £500 costs and a £120 victim surcharge.
A Salmonella outbreak which infected 54 people, putting two in intensive care, was traced to a Kirkby takeaway.
dPoor hygiene procedures at Wok’s Cooking, in Richard Hesketh Drive, Westvale, are believed to have allowed the potentially deadly bacteria to pass from eggs sourced from a European supplier to other food in July last year.
Hidayet Tayar, who has owned the business for nine years, was ordered to pay £12,000 in fines and costs at Liverpool Magistrates’ Court today.
Tayar, 54, of Ness Grove, Kirkby, pleaded guilty to four counts of failing to comply with EU provisions concerning food safety and hygiene, under the Food Safety and Hygiene Regulations 2013.
Peter McCaughley, prosecuting on behalf of Knowsley council, said the youngest victim of the outbreak was a two-year-old toddler and the oldest was aged 74.
The court heard Knowsley Council Food Safety Officers were alerted to the problem on July 14, 2014, by a couple treated in hospital for suspected food poisoning after eating at Wok’s Cooking.
The premises were inspected by council officers the following day.
One burger joint in Pittsburgh has repeatedly kept raw hamburger meat, lettuce and coleslaw at temperatures that allow bacteria to flourish. A chain restaurant’s worst violations in the past three years were a missing floor tile and a dirty floor drain.
Both restaurants have maintained their approved-to-operate green stickers from the Allegheny County Health Department, but one would’ve earned a ‘C’ and the other an ‘A’ if the county’s attempts to institute a restaurant grading system had passed.
Nearly all of the roughly 4,200 restaurants in the county have a green sticker — no matter whether it had five high-risk health violations in its last inspection or none.
There have been two failed attempts, most recently in May, to pass an A-B-C restaurant grading system that could give consumers more refined health information at a key decision-making point — entering a restaurant.
Although the Allegheny County Health Department supported the change, the county council voted the A-B-C system down 12-1. Everyone who spoke at the meeting opposed the measure. Most were from the restaurant industry.
PublicSource wondered why there was so little support for the measure when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about one in six people get a foodborne-related illness a year.
So, we acquired the criteria for the potential grading system and records of health inspections from July 2014 through April 2015. The result of combining the two is a look at how county restaurants would have scored under the letter grading system.
About three-quarters of nearly 5,000 restaurant inspections in the county would’ve resulted in an ‘A’, according to the PublicSource analysis.
About 18 percent of inspections would’ve earned a ‘B’ and 6 percent would’ve gotten a ‘C’ grade. A ‘C’ grade could include multiple high-risk violations, such as cutting lettuce on the same surface as raw meat, in addition to several medium- and low-risk violations.
The analysis started with July 2014 because that’s when inspectors started assigning a level of severity to each health inspection violation.
The analysis showed there were 57 inspections in that 10-month period that would’ve fallen below a ‘C’ and warranted an alert or closure by the health department.
The health department actually issued just 11 consumer alerts and closed 11 restaurants.
“When we examined the number of violations that were occurring on first inspection and also the number of repeat visits that we were being required to do, it was very apparent that there needed to be changes made” to the inspection system, said Dr. Karen Hacker, head of the Allegheny County Health Department.
But the county council voted the measure down. “The council represents the populace so we must abide by that decision,” Hacker said.
Allegheny County has a green, yellow and red system, which basically operates as a pass or fail method.
Green means a restaurant is permitted to operate; yellow means the health department issued an alert to warn consumers about poor health conditions; and red means the restaurant was ordered to close.
It wasn’t always this way. Pittsburgh had an A-B-C grading system, along with many other cities, after World War II. Allegheny County instituted its current system in 1994.
Kevin Joyce, owner of The Carlton Restaurant, a white-tablecloth restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh, was a chief opponent of the recent proposal to change the system. He said, “I think what a green rating means is that it’s a place that’s safe to eat — that the county’s inspected it and it’s safe to eat.”
However, as PublicSource found, there’s a wide spectrum of cleanliness in the kitchen among restaurants operating with a green sticker.
About 18 percent of inspections would have resulted in a perfect score during the 10-month period studied, while 12 percent had at least two-high risk violations in a single inspection.
The most common high-risk violations include not following cleanliness guidelines and not keeping food hot or cold enough.
Several of the city’s well-known chefs and restaurant owners declined to be interviewed about the grading system.
Consumers might not be aware of problems at restaurants unless they go to the health department’s website to view inspection reports.
John Graf, who owns the Priory Hotel on the North Side and is vice chair of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association board, said the inspection reports provide the best information to consumers.
“How long does it take to go to the county website?” Graf said. “People are on Google or Facebook for hours on end, you know, use your smartphone and look it up. I don’t see that that’s a huge barrier.”
Doug Powell, a former food safety professor at Kansas State University and co-author of the food safety blog BarfBlog, said health information is most effective at the point of sale.
“The value of grading systems at the door is that most people make decisions when they walk up to the restaurant,” Powell said. “They’re not going to look online. Lots of places have tried putting up websites and other things, but most people are going to make decisions when they go to the door.”
As an alternative, the Allegheny County Health Department is exploring the idea of putting QR codes on restaurants, so someone with a smartphone could scan the code and see the restaurant’s health inspections.
The grim hygiene conditions at a town centre all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant where health inspectors found a rodent infestation, live cockroaches and mouse droppings in a bag of rice, can be revealed after one of the operators was found guilty of breaching 19 food hygiene regulations.
Hend Hamude and Mardan Mahmood, the operators of North End’s Babylon Inn, were charged with a host of food hygiene breaches at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court on September 23.
Hamude, who denied 19 charges, claimed she was not in charge of food hygiene in the buffet, but a District Judge found against her.
Her husband, Mahmood – a doctor who runs a private surgery in Croydon and is based at Lewisham Hospital – earlier pleaded guilty to 19 food safety offences and 36 on behalf of Babylon Inn Ltd, of which he is a director.
The court was told how council officers had inspected the premises five times in the four years it has been trading as Babylon Inn, since its conversion to an Asian buffet restaurant from the Cartwright Inn pub.
They found that the company:
– failed to act on an ‘active’ cockroach infestation in a storage room;
– allowed the cockroach infestation to spread ‘throughout’ the premises;
– did not dispose of food prepared during the infestation;
– failed to effectively clean and disinfect equipment;
– kept cooked meats under an area of flaking ceiling;
– placed pest poison in food preparation areas;
– left high-risk cooked foods at a temperature that might risk health;
– failed to stop someone smoking on the premises;
– failed to put in place adequate procedures to deal with an “active” mouse and rat infestation throughout the basement;
– were caught with mouse droppings in a bag of rice and broken glass near food.
A food safety manager in an Auckland hospital who was fired after unsafe work practices was not unjustifiably dismissed as she claims.
Former food service manager at North Shore Hospital Padmini Singh was employed by Compass Group from August 2009 until January 2015.
Her employment ended after she was found to have been lacking in a number of areas in food safety and a decision on a demotion for her couldn’t be reached.
Compass Group had already been warned about food safety prior to audits of Singh’s work coming up short.
An outbreak of norovirus at North Shore Hospital in 2012 was found to have most likely originated in the hospital kitchen – though this was never confirmed nor linked to Singh.
During the outbreak there were 59 cases of gastroenteritis with each patient having had the same food.
The Ministry for Primary Industries conducted an investigation and there were indications the culprit may have been a chicken and barley soup served at lunch.
Ultimately, the source of the norovirus was not determined and MPI issued a formal warning to Compass Group that it was at risk of legal action.
Operations manager Raymond Hall said this warning was related to hand hygiene practices, training and food safety documentation.