It has been 30 years since the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) published the first Food Code, which serves as a model framework for ensuring food safety in retail food establishments – including restaurants, grocery stores, foodservice areas in convenience stores, caterers, and cafeterias in schools, hospitals, nursing facilities, and other institutions. State and local health departments are responsible for licensing and inspecting these foodservice operations and enforcing Food Code regulations, including potentially citing health code violations.
The Food Code is updated every 2-5 years to reflect consumer food practices and preferences, emerging business models, and evolving science. The most recent version was updated at the end of 2022, so we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the types of health code violations most frequently encountered in retail food establishments.
To do that, we enlisted the help of experts in this field. The Top 5 Violations across the U.S. were pulled together with the help of a third-party proprietary technology that aggregates and standardizes public health inspection data. The analysis was done against a large representative sample of data from local health department jurisdictions across the U.S. We then asked Dr. Hal King, Managing Partner of Active Food Safety, to help provide advice on how establishments can best prevent these violations.
Top 5 U.S. Health Inspection Violations for 2022:
#5 Certified Food Protection Manager presence (4.06%)
#4 Hot and cold holding of time/temperature control for safety food (5.45%)
#3 Equipment maintenance & adjustment (5.52%)
To get the top two and more information on all five violations, including prevention tips from Dr. King, read the full article on our Food Safety Learning Center.