Illinois Injury and Mass Tort Lawyer Blog

We place a great deal of trust in our food safety system. We trust that the individuals who harvest, package, prepare, and serve our food are using reasonable care to ensure that the food is handled and stored in a manner that reduces the chances for contamination to occur. Although this system works in most cases, there are some unfortunate instances in which individuals take advantage of the system and put consumers at risk.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office recently reported that a resident in Miami-Dade County was sentenced to almost one-and-a-half years in prison for knowingly distributing contaminated cheese. The defendant, Christian Rivas, owns a food business based in Miami called Oasis Brands, Inc. According to Count I of the indictment, the defendant engaged in intentional fraud when he delivered a packaged cheese product packaged at the facility that contained listeria. This is an incredibly harmful food contaminant that can lead to serious health consequences, sometimes requiring hospitalization and even leading to death on some occasions.

According to documents filed in the court proceeding, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services received an alert from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, indicating that cheese provided by the defendant’s company was randomly sampled on July 26, 2015, and tested positive for listeria. The FDA then conducted an inspection of the facility, which revealed several violations of good manufacturing practices. Numerous environmental swab samples from the premises also tested positive for listeria.

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Consumers are paying more and more attention to food safety. Federal regulators are also making the safety and reliability of our food system a higher priority. A recent survey from TrendSource, Inc., a San Diego-based data collection and analysis service, sought to figure out which perceptions diners have about food safety. The survey involved asking nearly 3,000 consumers who were at least 18 years old about a number of topics involving safety. The subjects included food handling, cleanliness, employee hygiene, and food-borne illnesses. The majority of the people who participated in the study were females with college educations, ages 31 to 60. The study focused primarily on fast-casual restaurants.

Approximately 65 percent of the people surveyed reported that they patronize a fast-casual restaurant a couple times each month and that they will visit on average four different restaurants during that timeframe. Over 80 percent of survey members prefer to see their food being prepared, believing that it gives them a better sense of whether it was prepared safely and helps them ensure its quality. An even higher percentage of participants stated that when the individuals preparing their food wear gloves, they believe their food is either safe or very safe to eat. Still, slightly more than half of the people surveyed indicated that they do not think employees at restaurants wash their hands after using a restroom, after taking a smoking break, or prior to handling food items.

When it comes to biases, almost half of participants said that they believe certain types of foods are more likely to be contaminated than others. Some of these biases were based on cultural cuisines, with Mexican food topping the list of cuisines most likely to cause illnesses.

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