Source: Lisa M. Keefe, MEATINGPLACE, 5/23/18


In a study of food safety inspectors, researchers at Harvard Business School found that several factors unrelated to food safety performance can affect how well inspectors do their jobs looking for violations.

That is, inspectors tended to cite fewer violations per establishment as the day wore on; cited fewer violations and moved through their duties more quickly if they were working later than usual; and, having completed an inspection with excessive numbers of violations, were more likely to write up violations at subsequent establishments, according to an abstract of the paper, “How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections,” a working paper published on the website of the Social Science Research Network.

The results are intended to apply to inspectors of all types of business sectors, but the study sample included information on 12,017 inspections by 86 inspectors over several years at 3,399 restaurants, grocers and schools in Alaska, Illinois and New Jersey, according to a report in Food Safety News.

In the area of food safety, the researchers propose that arranging an inspector’s schedule to account for such biases, if the rescheduling was 100 percent successful, would produce an average of 9.9 percent more violations noted which could result in 19 million fewer cases of foodborne illness each year, and savings of an aggregated $14.2 billion to $30.9 billion.

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