Improving the Reliability of Food Safety Disclosure: Restaurant Grading in Seattle-King County

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Publish Date:
September 1, 2021
Author(s):
    , ,
Source:
Journal of Environmental Health
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Summary

The reliability of food safety inspection disclosures has long been questioned. Providing meaningful disclosures to consumers based on public data is a core challenge for environmental health. We present new results, based on retrospective data and a novel randomized peer review trial, to improve the reliability of the restaurant food safety grading system that was implemented in Seattle and King County, Washington, in 2017. To address critiques of inspections as driven by inspector differences and merely “snapshots-in-time,” we used data from multiple inspections and adjusted scores within each inspector area to isolate relative performance. We studied the geographic distribution, predictability, and reliability of this adjusted grading system.

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