Line coolers at Mimi’s Cafe in Buford were not working properly during a recent routine inspection, and the air temperature along hazardous food products were too warm.
The Gwinnett County health inspector said a line drawer cooler across from the grill had a temperature of 48.9 degrees, and the cooler under the grill measured 54 degrees. A Mimi’s manager had already notified the corporate office about the coolers.
The restaurant staff had to toss out several food products such as tuna, sausage, cheese, ham, salmon, lettuce, chicken, meatloaf and au jus for the French dip beef sandwiches.
The inspector also noted built-in thermometers in the line coolers were not working, and no other thermometers were placed inside the coolers to measure air temperature.
An employee cracked eggs into a pan then handled peppers and onions inside a cooler without changing gloves and washing hands.
Food was stored under a condensation leak in the freezer, and boxes and plastic containers had ice buildup. The open food packages were discarded.
The game commission is investigating, according to PennLive.
A confidential tip led to the investigation, a commission spokesman told PennLive. Travis Lau said game animals for consumption must be farm-raised and game shot by hunters cannot be sold.
New China’s owner told PennLive that he doesn’t sell deer meat and that deer bones confiscated were for soup for him and his wife.
The deer parts violation was one of 18 violations documented on a Dec. 16 inspection, according to the agriculture department’s report. A follow-up inspection Dec. 17 documented 14 violations, including an unidentifiable pig organ, which the operator’s wife said was her lunch. It was discarded.
I’ve always thought eastern Ontario was a bit slow on the pick-up, but almost 15 years after Toronto introduced its red-yellow-green system of inspection disclosure, Cornwall, Ontario is following suit.
The system will require restaurant owners to hang a sign in their premises which alerts diners to whether or not they have met safe food-handling requirements, among other issues.
To increase the visibility of inspection reports, the EOHU has started distributing coloured signs to restaurants for public display.
The coloured signs indicate at a glance whether a restaurant or grocery store has received a “pass” (green sign), “conditional pass” (yellow sign) or “closed” (red sign) inspection report.
The new signage system is being rolled out starting with premises that prepare, process or handle food, and will progressively expand to all food premises, including grocery stores.
On Dec. 21 the state also issued a stop sale on 28 packages of chips after finding they were not in a ‘wholesome, sound condition.’
In addition, food safety issues written up in the inspection include potentially hazardous food thawed at room temperature with two tuna packages and two meat packages on the back prep table thawing, Subway’s manager lacking proof of a food manager certification, and employees failing to wash their hands before putting on gloves to work with food and failing to wash prior to heading to the front line to work.
More hand washing concerns include the hand wash sink not accessible for employees to use due to bread baking holders stored in the sink and no paper towels provided.
The state has warned this Clearwater Beach Subway before about high priority violations. In September, the state found no hot water in the facility for employees to wash their hands, no soap, no paper towels and a long list of potentially hazardous cold food held at greater than 41° Fahrenheit.
Philip Reeves of NPR’s The Salt blog writes that as soon as the pink-clad Ayesha Mumtaz steps out of her car, word of her arrival spreads along the street like a forest fire. Storekeepers begin shooing away customers, hauling down the shutters, and heading into the shadows in the hope that Mumtaz’s scrutinizing eye will not fall on them.
These traders would sooner lose business than risk a visit from a woman whose campaign to clean up the kitchens and food factories of Pakistan has made her a national celebrity, nicknamed “The Fearless One.”
Today, Mumtaz has come to a crowded alley in Lahore, a city with a long history of producing splendid South Asian cuisine, but with a less distinguished record of worrying about how food reaches the plate.
She is here to fire a fresh volley in her self-declared “war” against unhygienic food, by raiding a backstreet business that makes cakes, sweets and desserts for wholesale. Her target is a crumbling concrete house where the cooking takes place in the yard.
Mumtaz marches through the iron gate and begins rummaging around the big grubby pots and fly-blown cans of gooey liquid that seem to be lying around haphazardly. The place is strewn with dirty containers, grimy rags and rusty tin cans.
“You see the cleanliness of the utensils?” Mumtaz asks scathingly, as she holds up a giant spoon, crusted with filth. She reaches under a bench and hauls out a container littered with moldy scraps of cake.
It is “really horrible” that consumers are unaware the cakes and sweets that they’re buying over the counter are produced amid such squalor, says Mumtaz. She glares at the owner, who watches on in sullen silence.
Six months ago Mumtaz, 38, took over as operations director of the Punjab Food Authority, a government agency tasked with ensuring that the food served to Pakistan’s most populous province is hygienic and unadulterated.
Punjab has a population that is more than double that of California. Lahore, the provincial capital, has a vast array of food outlets, as you’d expect in a city whose relish for food is legendary.
He and his wife are conscientious about their food: They eat organic, local produce and ethically raised animals. Collins liked to have a meal at Chipotle once a week. On Friday evening, Oct. 23, he ordered his regular chicken bowl at his usual Chipotle in Lake Oswego. His dinner was made of 21 ingredients, including toasted cumin, sautéed garlic, fresh organic cilantro, finely diced tomatoes, two kinds of onion, romaine lettuce, and kosher salt. It tasted as good as always.
By the next night, Collins’s body was aching and his stomach was upset. Then he began experiencing cramping and diarrhea. His stomach bloated. “Moving gave me excruciating pain,” he says, “and anytime I ate or drank it got worse.” His diarrhea turned bloody. “All I was doing was pooping blood. It was incredibly scary.” After five days, he went to an urgent-care clinic near his home; the nurse sent him to an emergency room. He feared he might have colon cancer.
On Halloween, the ER doctor called him at home: Collins had Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli 026, and he’d likely gotten it from one of those 21 ingredients in his meal at Chipotle. (This was later confirmed by public-health officials.) The doctor warned him that kidney failure was possible; intensive treatment, including dialysis, could be necessary. His kidneys held up, but it took an additional five days for the worst of Collins’s symptoms to ease and nearly six weeks for him to recover. He still doesn’t have as much physical strength as he used to, and he feels emotionally shaky, too. “Before, I was doing the P90X workouts. For a long time after, I couldn’t even walk a few blocks,” he says. “It made me feel old and weak and anxious.” On Nov. 6, Collins sued Chipotle, seeking unspecified damages.
Collins was among 53 people in nine states who were sickened with the same strain of E. coli. “I trusted they were providing me with ‘food with integrity,’ ” Collins says, sarcastically repeating the company motto. “We fell for their branding.” Chipotle’s public stance during the outbreak irritated him, too. The company closed all 43 of its restaurants in Oregon and Washington in early November to try to identify the source of the E. coli and sanitize the spaces. Notices on restaurant doors generally referred to problems with the supply chain or equipment. But local media reported that at least one restaurant in Portland put up a note that said, “Don’t panic … order should be restored to the universe in the very near future.” “That felt so snarky,” Collins says. “People could die from this, and they were so smug.”
For a long time, smug worked pretty well for Chipotle Mexican Grill. It’s grown into a chain of more than 1,900 locations, thanks in part to marketing—including short animated films about the evils of industrial agriculture—that reminds customers that its fresh ingredients and naturally raised meat are better than rivals’ and better for the world. The implication: If you eat Chipotle, you’re doing the right thing, and maybe you’re better, too. It helped the company, charging about $7 for a burrito, reach a market valuation of nearly $24 billion. Its executives seemed to have done the impossible and made a national fast-food chain feel healthy.
Fewer people associate Chipotle with “healthy” now. Three months before Collins was infected with E. coli, five people fell ill eating at a Seattle-area restaurant. By the time local health officials had confirmed a link, the outbreak was over, so no one said anything. In August, 234 customers and employees contracted norovirus at a Chipotle in Simi Valley, Calif., where another worker was infected. Salmonella-tainted tomatoes at 22 outlets in Minnesota sickened 64 people in August and September; nine had to be hospitalized. Norovirus struck again in late November: More than 140 Boston College students picked up the highly contagious virus from a nearby Chipotle, including half of the men’s basketball team. An additional 16 students and three health-care staff picked it up from the victims. The source? A sick worker who wasn’t sent home although Chipotle began offering paid sick leave in June. In the second week of December, when Chipotle should have been on highest alert, a Seattle restaurant had to be briefly shut down after a health inspection found that cooked meat on the takeout line wasn’t being kept at a high enough temperature. And in the most recent case, on Dec. 21, the CDC announced it was investigating an outbreak of what seems to be a different and rare version of E. coli 026 that’s sickened five people in two states who ate at Chipotle in mid-November. The company says it had expected to see additional cases. It still doesn’t know which ingredients made people ill.
Almost 500 people around the country have become sick from Chipotle food since July, according to public-health officials. And those are just the ones who went to a doctor, gave a stool sample, and were properly diagnosed. Food-safety experts say they believe with any outbreak the total number of people affected is at least 10 times the reported number. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from contaminated food every year.
At Chipotle, three different pathogens caused the five known outbreaks. That wasn’t inevitable or coincidental. “There’s a problem within the company,” says Michael Doyle, the director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia. Chipotle has gotten big selling food that’s unprocessed, free of antibiotics and GMOs, sometimes organic, sometimes local. “Blah, blah, blah,” says Doug Powell, a retired (I’m not dead yet) food-safety professor and the publisher of barfblog.com. “They were paying attention to all that stuff, but they weren’t paying attention to microbial safety.” Whatever its provenance, if food is contaminated it can still make us sick—or even kill. Millennials may discriminate when they eat, but bacteria are agnostic.
“Food with integrity,” a promise to Chipotle’s customers and a rebuke to its competitors, has become the source of much schadenfreude among both. Chipotle’s stock has lost about 30 percent of its value since August. Sales at established stores dropped 16 percent in November, and executives expect a decline of 8 percent to 11 percent in comparable-store sales for the last three months of the year. That would be the first quarterly decline for Chipotle as a public company.
Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and co-chief executive, went on the Today show on Dec. 10, apologized to everyone who’d fallen ill, and announced a comprehensive food-safety program that he said would far exceed industry norms. He didn’t address why a company that had challenged quality standards with such gusto hadn’t taken on safety standards as well.
On Dec. 17, speaking by phone in New York, he’s still on message, describing the Seattle restaurants he visited as clean and organized. “I ate delicious food there,” he says. “Traffic was slow, but we’re ready for people to come back. There is no E. coli in Chipotle. ” To hear Ells tell it, the company is witnessing an outbreak of excitement. He says the chain’s suppliers are excited to participate in the new safety programs; employees at headquarters in Denver are excited to contribute however they can; it’s “a very, very exciting time for us to be pushing the boundaries” on food safety. “We’re embracing this as an opportunity.”
Ells studied art history in college, trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America, and opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993 with a loan from his father. He set up a model—open kitchen, fresh ingredients, real cooking in the back, and an assembly line in front, allowing customization and speed—that’s become its own industry standard. Chipotle grew from 489 restaurants and revenue of $628 million in 2006, when it went public, to about 1,800 restaurants and $4.1 billion in revenue in 2014. Net profit increased 60 percent from 2012 to 2014. Ells and his co-CEO, Montgomery Moran, together earned more than $140 million in total compensation during that time. And Michael Pollan, the good-food arbiter, said that Chipotle was his favorite fast-food chain and that he didn’t have a second.
The company was influenced in ways it doesn’t always admit by the biggest, most industrialized chain of them all: McDonald’s. The company invested about $340 million in Chipotle from 1998, when it had 13 restaurants in Colorado, until 2006, when the two parted ways. McDonald’s taught Chipotle supply-chain economics. Chipotle often derides fast-food chains and their factory farms, enlisting the likes of Willie Nelson to make plaintive music videos about crop chemicals and steroidal cattle. But Ells respects McDonald’s size. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2014, he said Chipotle could one day be “bigger than McDonald’s in the U.S. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable way to think about this.”
“I think it’s all baloney,” said Gus Hionas, owner of the Midtown II at 122 S. 11th Street in Center City. “This place has been open 24 hours a day for 43 years. I’ve never poisoned anyone or made anyone sick. This is a disgrace what they’re doing.”
Midtown II was cited Dec. 17 for a total of 32 violations, 18 of which were noted as serious risk factors. Some food safety professionals consider having two violations as being too many. At Midtown II, serious infractions included an employee touching ready to eat food with her bare hands, encrusted food debris on kitchen equipment, severely dented canned items and improperly stored food that was being held in “danger zone” temperatures prone to breeding toxic bacteria.
“I know what needs to be done and what’s not to be done,” Hionas said after a reporter read him the list of violations. “It’s ridiculous. Most of what they say makes no sense.”
Federal Donuts, the celebrated mecca of deep-fried joy at 16th and Sansom Streets, was dinged Dec. 17 for 12 infractions. Five of the violations are technically considered serious risk factors, but most diners would question the seriousness of an employee leaving a cup on a counter or an employee “improperly drinking” from a water bottle actually could be.
Steve Cook, co-owner of the five-restaurant chicken and donut empire, said inspectors seemed to be under pressure from health department superiors to come down harder on restauranteurs.
“Since the Joy Tsin Lau incident they’ve decided to really get tough,” Cook said, referring to the episode early this year where 100 lawyers and law students were sickened following a banquet at a Chinatown restaurant. “We’re not perfect, but why are they giving us such a hard time?
Scores of sick customers who had eaten at the Real China had to be rushed to A&E following an outbreak of Salmonella.
Southampton Magistrates’ Court heard shocked inspectors found hunks of raw meat left in a sink and dirty tea towels dumped on the kitchen floor of the restaurant in Eastleigh, Hampshire.
Now those involved with the restaurant at the time have been hit with £70,000 in fines and costs, after what was reportedly the biggest food poisoning outbreak the borough council has ever seen.
Akkora Management, who run the restaurant, and director Zudong Liu admitted 15 offences of failing to comply with EU laws relating to food safety and hygiene.
The company was given a fine of £30,000, Liu a further £21,500 and £22,000 in costs was also ordered, the Daily Echo reports.
The Gwinnett County health inspector said a line drawer cooler across from the grill had a temperature of 48.9 degrees, and the cooler under the grill measured 54 degrees. A Mimi’s manager had already notified the corporate office about the coolers.
