Every restaurant owner wants to avoid foodborne illness incidents and accusations, since a single lawsuit stemming from a food poisoning incident can have serious consequences for the restaurant's business, including poor brand image, high legal costs, and reduced customer loyalty. This article examines how restaurant operators can handle food poisoning accusations from customers.

This article explores the food safety challenges of the labor-heavy catering sector, including the pervasive lack of food safety culture and management commitment; the need for creative solutions in process monitoring for large facilities; how to build an effective training program for a catering facility; and how to handle customer complaints, including the importance of root cause analysis.

The culture of a facility in food safety or customer relations is impacted by how customer communications are managed. Customer complaint trending and response are part of a company or facility's risk management strategy. The objective of any management system is to try to protect the company from adverse actions. Understanding and responding to customer complaints is one strategy.