Content area
Full text
Abstract Understanding basic food safety is essential to preparing and serving safe food. The Self-Analysis for Food Excellence (SAFE) program was developed to promote food safety and improve restaurant sanitation scores in Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee. SAFE is a food safety training program emphasizing high-risk food practices from receiving to service. The program was offered to restaurants that had performed poorly on routine food service inspections. Restaurant management and key personnel were encouraged to participate in SAFE.
To assess the effectiveness of SAFE, we compared participating restaurants to nonparticipating restaurants with similar food service inspection performance during 2009-2010 in Nashville and Davidson County. We evaluated and analyzed inspectional observations before and after SAFE training. While both groups improved their food safety inspection performance, no statistically significant differences regarding critical violations were noted between restaurants that participated in the SAFE program and restaurants that did not. This study, however, does not account for regulatory impact or other variables that could provide more clarity in the results of food safety training.
Introduction
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), every year foodborne pathogens infect 1 in 6 people in the U.S. and cause an estimated 3,000 deaths (Scal-lan et al., 2011). In addition, approximately 900 foodborne illness outbreaks are reported annually in the U.S. It is estimated that 60% of these outbreaks are associated with food prepared in a restaurant (Dewey-Mattia et al., 2017). Reducing foodborne illness by just 10% would prevent 5 million people in the U.S. from getting sick each year and result in significant healthcare cost savings, as foodborne illness is estimated to cost $15.6 billion each year (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2020).
Public health agencies across the U.S. incorporate regulatory food service inspections as a tool to help promote food safety. In addition, most public health agencies are tasked with providing food safety training-a widely recognized and significant component of a food protection program. According to CDC, food safety training is an integral part of public health strategy for communicating and promoting food safety (CDC, 2018).
In Tennessee, regulations for food service establishments are written and adopted into law by the Tennessee Department of Health and enforced throughout the state. All Tennessee Department of Health...