title: Restaurant food cooling practices.
abstract: Improper food cooling practices are a significant cause of foodborne illness, yet little is known about restaurant food cooling practices. This study was conducted to examine food cooling practices in restaurants. Specifically, the study assesses the frequency with which restaurants  meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommendations aimed at reducing pathogen proliferation during food cooling. Members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Environmental Health Specialists Network collected data on food cooling practices in 420 restaurants. The data  collected indicate that many restaurants are not meeting FDA recommendations concerning cooling. Although most restaurant kitchen managers report that they have formal cooling processes (86%) and provide training to food workers on proper cooling (91%), many managers said that they do not  have tested and verified cooling processes (39%), do not monitor time or temperature during cooling processes (41%), or do not calibrate thermometers used for monitoring temperatures (15%). Indeed, 86% of managers reported cooling processes that did not incorporate all FDA-recommended components.  Additionally, restaurants do not always follow recommendations concerning specific cooling methods, such as refrigerating cooling food at shallow depths, ventilating cooling food, providing open-air space around the tops and sides of cooling food containers, and refraining from stacking cooling  food containers on top of each other. Data from this study could be used by food safety programs and the restaurant industry to target training and intervention efforts concerning cooling practices. These efforts should focus on the most frequent poor cooling practices, as identified by this  study.
authors.affiliation: National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA 30341, USA. lrgreen@cdc.gov
authors.forename: Laura Green
authors.initials: LG
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Danny
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ripley
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Blade
authors.forename: Dave
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Reimann
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Everstine
authors.forename: Dave
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nicholas
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Egan
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Koktavy
authors.forename: Daniela N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Quilliam
mesh_terms: D003257:Consumer Product Safety; D005506:Food Contamination / Q000032:analysis / Q000517:prevention & control*; D005511:Food Handling / Q000379:methods*; D005516:Food Microbiology; D005522:Food Services / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D012147:Restaurants; D013696:Temperature; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States; D014486:United States Food and Drug Administration