Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its report on the Occurrence of Foodborne Illness Risk Factors in Fast Food and Full-service Restaurants. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) more than half of foodborne illness outbreaks that occur each year are associated with food from restaurants.
This report summarizes the agency’s findings from the 2017-2018 data collection, and is part of the FDA’s 10-year (2013-2022) study on trends in the occurrence of foodborne illness risk factors and food safety behaviors and practices in food service facilities. Risk factors are food preparation practices that can contribute to outbreaks of foodborne illness, such as inadequate cooking, poor personal hygiene, or using food from unsafe sources.
The restaurants used in the study were located across the United States and randomly selected for data collections by the FDA Retail Food Specialists. Findings from the 2017-2018 report suggested that a well-developed and documented Food Safety Management System (FSMS) can help reduce the occurrence of foodborne illness risk factors. Other key findings mentioned in the report include:
- Inadequate cooking was the least out-of-compliance foodborne illness risk factor investigated in the study;
- Having well-developed Food Safety Management Systems (FSMS) were the strongest predictor that risk factors would be minimized; and
- The two most commonly occurring risk factors were improper holding time and temperature, and poor personal hygiene.
You can review the complete list of findings from the report. Data from the 2017-2018 collection will be used to evaluate trends in the occurrence of risk factors in future data collections and help the FDA identify where risk-based interventions may be needed to protect public health.
The results from the overall 10-year study are used to develop retail food safety initiatives, policies, and targeted intervention strategies focused on controlling foodborne illness risk factors, provide technical assistance to state, local, tribal, and territorial regulatory professionals, identify FDA retail work plan priorities and inform FDA resource allocation to enhance retail food safety nationwide.
For questions about this report, please contact the FDA National Retail Food Team at retailfoodpolicyteam@fda.hhs.gov.
