Dining Safety Alliance to Aid Restaurants with Certification

for Dining Safety, Giving Establishments

an A-Grade Sticker

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Monday, December 21, 2020

 

Restaurants receiving standardized A grades via inspections poised for boost in revenue and a chance to survive, thrive and reopen, fully, post-pandemic.

 

In these days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses -- small businesses -- especially, are either seeing a sharp decline in revenue or even facing closure, none more prevalently than the many restaurants and cafes across the nation. Bailouts, which are there for big airlines and other big businesses, are non-existent or negligible on behalf of the restaurant industry.

 

That’s where the non-profit, Dining Safety Alliance (http://www.diningsafetyalliance.org/) comes in.

 

The Dining Safety Alliance is inviting restaurants to participate in independent confidential virtual inspections and unique front-of-house serving food safety, delivering food safely and sanitation training – to establish their rating, and then have the ability to display an A+ certification in order to attract new and retain existing customers.

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“During my work as a board certified emergency department physician and department chief, a 22-year-old man died from foodborne illness, and it really impacted me. I decided that we needed to have a tool that helps people choose the safest restaurants and helps restaurants improve. Most are doing a good job, but some can improve. Part of the problem is having an understanding of causality and then focusing on education.

 

My team and I are members of or have partnered with organizations to explore these issues,” said organization founder, Dr. Harlan Stueven. It is due to Dr. Stueven’s passion for this issue that Dining Safety Alliance’s Dining Safety Certification Program will be launching in the state of Florida this coming January.

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Partnering with long-time restaurant consultants and industry veterans Jim Lopolito, and Leon Lubarsky, well-known authorities on food safety, the team of three have taken Dr. Stueven’s idea to the next level and will be offering certification courses to restaurant owners and their employees.

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However, it is the Dining Grades cornerstone program, amid the COVID-19 crisis –in collaboration with Dining Safety Alliance that is being proactively launched in order to provide food establishments a way to elevate their business. This will minimize food-borne illness risk to the public, the hidden danger in food handling, and sanitation risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. What this will allow restaurants to achieve is an A+ rating which they can then post in their restaurant window, on their menus or website, ensuring the public that they are topmost in dining safety: a measure which has been shown in past studies to increase a restaurant’s revenues by at least 5 percent. (Source: http://kuafu.umd.edu/%7Eginger/research/jin-leslie-choices-final.pdf)

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Other research partners in the Dining Safety Alliance’s court are the National Environmental Health Association (NEHA), National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI) and University of Minnesota.

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The Dining Safety Alliance intends to become an authority for restaurant dining safety, in order to assist the industry in this time of precarious operating budgets they are facing. 

 

“Educating staff alongside a structured virtual inspection service, provided by DSA, accommodates recognition in the front window to the establishment showing safety is a high concern to customers looking for a safe place to eat. This assembly of criteria and recognition has been proven to increase revenue,” said Jim Lopolito, Board member at Dining Safety Alliance. “Our job is to show them that. Our mission and vision is to help restaurants – especially the ‘mom and pops’ or smaller restaurants to not only survive, but eventually return to thriving.”

 

Dining Safety Alliance in collaboration with Dining Grades will be poised to improve restaurant business success, giving them their recognized grade, which will become their “stamp of approval” to their patrons – a much needed boost in this pandemic economy, and for the future of all restaurants.

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About Dining Safety Alliance
The idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is the foundation on which Dr. Harlan Stueven and his partners at Dining Safety Alliance – And Dr.Stueven’s Dining Grades – has been built. Dr. Stueven’s Dining Grades reviews hard data from public health inspection scores and converts it to a standardized numerical score and then a letter grade to enable the public to choose the safest restaurants.

 

Read more at: http://diningsafetyalliance.org/.

Christine Oneto
Dining Safety Alliance
+1 415-676-1662
christine.oneto@diningsafetyalliance.org

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