Tag Archives: restaurant inspection

‘They’re barfing again at Chipotle’ Company did the right thing in closing outlet with sick staffers

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Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc received praise for its handling of potential Norovirus infections at a Boston-area restaurant, as sick employees stayed home and the burrito chain quickly cleaned the restaurant.

norovirus-2Shares of Chipotle fell as much as 6.1 percent early, then gained back some ground after the head of the Billerica, Massachusetts public health department said the restaurant was cleaned and would reopen on Thursday. The stock closed down 3.4 percent at $506.63.

Reuters caught up with me at the Brisbane airport as me and the fam were about to leave for a 3-week tour of North America.

The closure of the Chipotle in the Boston suburb was seen as a partial test of a new food safety system rolled out after a series of illnesses hit the fresh burrito chain last year.

That workers stayed home in particular was a good sign, said Doug Powell, publisher of the food safety site barfblog.com. “It is an indication that the system is working,” he said. But customers may focus only on the sickness, not the company response. For burrito fans, “It’s just – ooh, they’re barfing at Chipotle again,” Powell said.

The company response was not a test of new measures to ensure ingredients are safe and avoid E.coli, he added.

John Patriquin /Staff Photographer; Tuesday, 1/25/11. Danny Leon (on right) and Julia Calder (center) serve customers at Chipotle restaurant in South Portland.

John Patriquin /Staff Photographer; Tuesday, 1/25/11. Danny Leon (on right) and Julia Calder (center) serve customers at Chipotle restaurant in South Portland.

Chipotle food scares last year include two E.coli outbreaks linked to its restaurants that sickened more than 50 people in 10 states, as well as separate outbreaks of norovirus, a highly contagious virus known as the “winter vomiting bug”, in Massachusetts and California that involved more than 350 diners.

Three employees are suspected to have norovirus in Billerica, the town’s Board of Health said. Earlier in the day, local Public Health Director Richard Berube told reporters that one of the three had been confirmed to have the virus.

Berube said Chipotle has been “very proactive” and remaining staff at the burrito restaurant would be screened for norovirus, he added.

Berube, the company and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health all said no customers were known to be sick.

“They did the right thing,” said Howard Penney, who covers the chain for Hedgeye Risk Management. However, he argued that Chipotle was still a “broken company” and that it would take years to return to its peak performance.

Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said the company closed the restaurant after employees called in sick.

Health violations close legendary Tampa restaurant

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Before we moved to Brisbane, I was urging Amy to get a professoring job at New College in Sarasota or the University of South Florida in Tampa.

cdb.pizza.tampaWe even met a dean from New College at the local megalomart as those remaining behind were prepping for a hurricane.

Unfortunately, French just isn’t a big deal down there.

So we ended up in Brisbane and turns out they are equidistant from the equator as is Brisbane, so not a bad deal.

And they have food safety issues, just like everywhere else.

State health inspectors have uncovered more health code violations inside a legendary restaurant popular among University of South Florida students. CDB’s Pizza Italian Restaurant is located on Fowler Avenue just east of campus.

For more than 50 years CDB’s has been serving up people in the North Tampa area surrounding USF.

“Yeah, I hear a lot of people go there,” said former customer Rick Krause.  “It seems pretty packed.”

But many customers may have no idea about this location’s history of health code violations.

“I could shoot you because you make my customers go away,” said CDB’s owner Jackie Xiu when we first met him back in 2013 when we arrived to ask about the restaurant’s 50 violations.

Back then, the restaurant expanded to also serve sushi and was cited for advertising “white tuna” on the menu.  State inspectors discovered his restaurant was actually serving a much cheaper fish called escolar banned in some countries.  While legal here in the U.S., the FDA warns it’s known to make some people sick with food poisoning like symptoms.

“Every sushi restaurant put white tuna on the menu,” insisted Xiu.  “They already know what white tuna … that’s just a name.”

10Investigates WTSP has now learned state health inspectors were back again this month shutting down CDB’s with a whole new set of problems.

 The violations included live roaches near the pizza oven and by a food cart with raw sewage backing up behind the sushi bar.  The inspector reported employees were walking through the mess while preparing food.

“The owner is not here right now.  You can come back when he’s here,” said a manager who did not provide his name.  “Maybe tomorrow or the next day.  I’ve got a restaurant full of people right now we can’t do it.”

Since management was unable to comment on what was done to get the problems corrected, 10Investigates instead discussed the inspection report with customers.

“If I didn’t know any better I would have walked in there and sat down and ate the food,” said Juan Evans just steps before walking inside.

It’s not the first time health inspectors have found issues this year.  In January the inspector found more roaches right around the food prep table, next to the clean dish rack and crawling across a clean food container.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Evans.  “Something like this you wouldn’t even think it would be a warning.   This would have been enough for them to close down for good.”

It seems to be a pattern of problems.   We visited another restaurant owned by Jackie Xiu in January of last year.  Kobe Italian on Ulmerton Road in Largo was shut down back then also with live roaches and dangerous temperature violations.

More recently in December, that same location also written up for misrepresenting white tuna on the menu.   The inspector documenting escolar in the freezer and at the sushi bar.

Brisbane, Tampa, wherever, food safety is faith-based.

And that has to change.

Everyone’s got a camera: Indiana mold high-school edition

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nobody's.faultNobody’s fault.

Or so they say.
HACCP is short for, CYA – cover your ass.

A photo of food served at Central High School circulating social media has at least one student thinking about bringing his lunch to school for a while.

The photo, posted on Facebook and Twitter Monday, shows a student pulling back the lid of an individually packaged cream cheese to find the top covered in thick, green mold.

Isaiah York, a senior at Central, said it was his friend who found the cheese at breakfast. They took it to the principal, who then talked to the cafeteria staff.

“I was a bit grossed out about it, it made me a bit uneasy,” York said Tuesday. “When we opened it, I was a bit in shock to be honest. … That’s my first time encountering that.”

Dianna Choate, director of food services at MCS, said her staff called the manufacturer as soon as they saw the package. The cheese arrived at the school in individual, sealed packages and was within the expiration date, she said.

She said they opened several other containers and didn’t find another molded one, but threw them all away as a precaution.

The district is in the process of outsourcing its cafeteria staff to a national food service company, Chartwells. MCS spokesperson Ana Pichardo confirmed “this has nothing to do with Chartwells.” The company is set to fully take over operations after spring break.

Jammie Bane, a Delaware County Health department administrator, said the situation was brought to the department’s attention and is being investigated. Although the investigation is ongoing, Bane said he personally felt that it was not the schools’ fault because the product came prepackaged from the manufacturer.

“I feel it’s a shame that MCS is being made out negatively for something that could occur anywhere, at any time, whether a school, business, or personal home,” Bane said via email. “An incident occurring does not point towards a trend, and does not point towards the schools not caring or not taking actions in an effort to ensure it doesn’t occur again. As a matter of fact, our local schools excel at food safety.”

This isn’t the first time pictures of inedible food at Muncie Community Schools have been on social media. During a school board meeting last month, when the board was considering hiring Chartwells, board member Kathy Carey said she was “appalled” at pictures of rotten food that had been shared with her on social media.

‘External intrusion’ source of St. Maarten resort Norovirus outbreak

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They have a way with language down on the islands.

Sonesta Maho Beach Resort and CasinoAccording to The Daily Herald, the Norovirus outbreak at the Sonesta Maho Beach Resort and Casino in February was due to “external intrusion stimulated by cross- contamination,” and not a result of food or drinking water at the resort, Collective Prevention Services (CPS) said on Monday.

Some 200 tourists, who had arrived on the island from Canada around February 17, and an unspecified number of students who had been at the resort for a regional debating competition, soon after were affected by the outbreak. CPS released the information after completing its report on the outbreak.

CPS said the Resort noticed a sudden spike in guests complaining of mainly vomiting and a few cases also had diarrhea; affected were the Canadian tourists. The hotel’s consulting doctor was called in and guidelines were provided in connection with sanitation measures. After a dormant period of about a week, a sudden increase in gastroenteritis was again noted amongst the overseas students, some of whom had checked-in on February 24, and the majority on February 25.

Sonesta-Maho-Beach-Resort-And-Casino-All-Inclusive-photos-ExteriorTreatment was provided by the hotel’s physician and at the St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC). Various sanitation and preventive measures were re-emphasised.

“Because of the inherit aggressiveness of the norovirus, very hard and effective measures had to be implemented in the hotel according to the investigations and inspection results observed by government officials,” CPS said in a press release. “The intervention by hotel management and staff in the initial phase was well managed. It can be concluded based on the ministries investigation that this was not an outbreak originating in food or drinking water, but rather by external intrusion stimulated by cross-contamination.”

Up to 100 sick with Salmonalla at Eagle’s Roost in Kentucky: Sick employee fingered

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The Estill County Judge Executive says the state has identified what they believe the source of a Salmonella outbreak that left nearly 100 in the county sick.

eagle's.roost.kyWKYT reports Judge Executive Wallace Taylor says the state’s investigation found that an employee at Eagle’s Roost had contracted the illness, most likely without knowing they had it.

State officials told Taylor that they believe that is what led to the spread which they say left nearly 100 sick in the county.

At last check health officials say over 70 Estill County residents reported gastrointestinal illness and 51 of them tested positive for Salmonella. Taylor tells WKYT they believe the number of those who got sick may have been higher than the numbers they recorded. Nearly a dozen people were hospitalized.

Improving food safety odds in Vegas: AI-based restaurant inspections

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Computer science researchers from the University of Rochester have developed an app for health departments that uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to identify food poisoning-related tweets, connect them to restaurants using geotagging and identify likely hot spots.

AI.rest.inspectionThe team presented the results of its research at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in February. The project was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing.

Location-based epidemiology is nothing new. John Snow, credited as the world’s first epidemiologist, used maps of London in 1666 to identify the source of the Cholera epidemic that was rampaging the city (a neighborhood well) and in the process discovered the connection between the disease and water sources.

However, as the researchers showed, it’s now possible to deduce the source of outbreaks using publicly available social media content and deep learning algorithms trained to recognize the linguistic traits associated with a disease – “I feel nauseous,” for instance.

“We don’t need to go door to door like John Snow did,” says Adam Sadilek, a researcher who worked on the project at the University of Rochester and who is now at Google Research. “We can use all this data and mine it automatically.”

The work presented at AAAI described a recent collaboration with the Las Vegas health department, where officials used the app they developed, called nEmesis, to improve the city’s inspection protocols.

Typically, cities (including Las Vegas) use a random system to decide which restaurants to inspect on any given day. The research team convinced Las Vegas officials to replace their random system with a list of possible sites of infection derived using their smart algorithms.

In a controlled experiment, half of the inspections were performed using the random approach and half were done using nEmesis, without the inspectors knowing that any change had occurred in the system.

AI.rest.inspection“Each morning we gave the city a list of places where we knew that something was wrong so they could do an inspection of those restaurants,” Sadilek said.

For three months, the system automatically scanned an average of 16,000 tweets from 3,600 users each day. 1,000 of those tweets snapped to a specific restaurant and of those, approximately 12 contained content that likely signified food poisoning. They used these tweets to generate a list of highest-priority locations for inspections.

Analyzing the results of the experiment, they found the tweet-based system led to citations for health violations in 15 percent of inspections, compared to 9 percent using the random system. Some of the inspections led to warnings; others resulted in closures.

The researchers estimate that these improvements to the efficacy of the inspections led to 9,000 fewer food poisoning incidents and 557 fewer hospitalization in Las Vegas during the course of the study.

 

Six closure orders served on Ireland food businesses in February

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The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) reports that six Closure Orders were served on food businesses during the month of February for breaches of food safety legislation, pursuant to the FSAI Act, 1998 and the EC (Official Control of Foodstuffs) Regulations, 2010. The Closure Orders were issued by environmental health officers in the Health Service Executive (HSE).

stockwell-artisan-foodsDr Pamela Byrne, Chief Executive, FSAI stated that consumers must be confident at all times that the food they are eating is safe to eat, adding, “There can be no excuse for putting consumers’ health at risk through negligent practices. Food businesses must recognise that they have a legal responsibility to make sure that the food they sell or serve is safe to consume. We are re-emphasising to all food businesses the need for ongoing and consistent compliance with food safety and hygiene legislation. This requires putting appropriate food safety management procedures in place and making sure they are strictly adhered to at all times.”

Fancy food ain’t safe food, Brisbane rock ‘n roll edition: ‘Live roaches inside the drinking straws’

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A trendy restaurant in Brisbane’s inner city which has been a magnet for rock ‘n’ roll types has admitted live cockroaches were running around its kitchen after pleading guilty to breaching food safety laws.

Libertine in The Barracks French-Vietnamese restaurant Libertine in The Barracks on Petrie Terrace was prosecuted in the Brisbane Magistrates Court and on February 5, admitted to eight breaches of food health laws in court that day.

The company, owned by Andrew Baturo, was fined $15,000.

Brisbane City Council’s Acting enforcement coordination manager Stephen Thomson told Magistrate Suzette Coates that he found more than a dozen live cockroaches and many more dead ones in 12 locations around the kitchen and pantry when he inspected on July 14, 2014.

He found “live cockroaches inside the drinking straws” kept under the stainless steel bench located on the right hand side of the kitchen near the door leading from the kitchen to the dining area.

Mr Thomson also found a dead cockroach inside a food preparation fridge, a live cockroach on the door steal of another fridge and a live adult cockroach on wall of the dry storage area.

Food safety, hockey: Training could be improved but at least something should be required

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In addition to endless sausage sizzles, folks in Brisbane are forever hosting school fetes, dinners, and homemade goods for sale at the weekly tuck shop.

I’m always wary of such items because I have no idea of the preparation technique, sanitation and storage.

doug.hockey.mar.16I need 16 hours of training to open a door on a kid’s hockey team, but nothing to offer up food for sale (that’s me this morning, after my practice, and before coaching a kids practice an hour later, getting in some blogging – I was working with the goalies so kept my pads on).

That’s going to change in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island.

Mandatory food hygiene training will be required for those preparing food for groups including non-profit organizations holding fundraising suppers and breakfasts.

The new training rules will come into effect on April 1 and will apply to everyone who is involved in food service, P.E.I. Environmental Health manager Joe Bradley said.

“It is for people to understand their role in preparing food for large groups of people as to prevent foodborne illness.”

At least one person in the group holding the fundraising event in which food is served will be required to have the training and will have to be on site, he said.

“Certainly for community groups, church groups that haven’t had the opportunity to access training yet, we would certainly look at a grace period for them to access that training.”

The required mandatory training takes about one day to complete. The free food safety courses are being offered this month in Charlottetown and Summerside.

A shorter course of just a couple of hours for non-profit groups, churches and community service organizations is being planned, Bradley said.

Fancy food ain’t safe food – UK’s award-winning Dorset Smokery edition

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Around 200kg of mouldy and contaminated meat, poultry and dairy products packaged for sale have been seized from a wholesaler in Hurn.

Dorset Smokery, in Hurn Court LanePublic Health officers from Christchurch and East Dorset Councils obtained a warrant to search The Dorset Smokery, in Hurn Court Lane, on Monday, February 24, following a tip off.

After investigating, officers found items, also including olives and pate, which they described as mouldy or past their use-by date which were packaged and labelled ready for purchase in the fridges and freezers.

Officers also saw a vacuum packing machine which was being used for both smoked and raw food, which could they said cause contamination and all of the food could have caused food poisoning if eaten.

Steve Duckett, Head of Housing and Health for Christchurch and East Dorset Councils, said that the food which had been through the machine was therefore classed as unfit for human consumption and was also seized.

He added that there were other vacuum packing machines on the premises but these were broken.

The seized food was kept in a freezer lorry until Todd Saddler, the owner of The Dorset Smokery, appeared before a judge at Bournemouth Magistrates Court on Monday, February 29.

The judge agreed that the food did not comply with the requirements of the Food Safety Act 1990 and ordered the Public Health officers to destroy all of it. Mr Sadler was also ordered to pay the councils’ costs of £750.

The Dorset Smokery had won awards for its artisan pate and wild boar and apple sausages and the Hurn Honker.

The company’s website is also no longer active. Their Facebook page, which describes the firm as a traditional smokery and charcuterie, has not been updated since December 2014.