Grading Restaurant Cleanliness

Posted by Fred Pritzker in Food Safety

Doug Powell is a food safety professor, journalist, commentator, critic and blogger. He was one of the first to aggregate food safety news and is widely read in the food safety community.

He often writes about restaurant safety and the public’s right to know about how restaurants score on sanitation inspections. His piece today talks about the debate in NYC about passage of a law requiring restaurants to post letter grades based on inspections.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak to a group of Illinois sanitation inspectors whose job it is to inspect and grade restaurants. My presentation was about how lawyers prove food safety cases. During the talk I asked the sixty or so attendees what they thought about mandatory restaurant grade posting. Surprisingly, at least to me, most were against it. Their comments are summarized as follows:

• Inspections are just “snapshots in time;” what happens on just one day may or may not be indicative of restaurant cleanliness throughout the course of a year
• With so much riding on a sanitation score, the relationship between inspector and restaurant will become contentious and lead to much more administrative action
• Posting restaurant scores is punitive; it’s better to encourage (one inspector from a small town said their practice is to publicize good scores)
• Many low risk violations may lower a score even though there is no real threat to the public.

My reaction to the inspector’s comments is that those concerns can be address in a uniform and fair grading system. And the system can be fine-tuned over time. Overall, the public’s right to know trumps any perceived unfairness to restaurants. Transparency is rarely a bad thing.