FOOD & DRINK
FOOD POISONING – EXPOSED
The news that AI may soon be used to track food poisoning outbreaks in restaurants means that optimum hygiene is going to become more crucial than ever from now on. Jeremy Bennett from Tork manufacturer Essity, looks at various ways of reducing the food poisoning risk in a restaurant.
Food poisoning appears to be on the rise. More than 5,300 cases were reported in the UK in 2024 –representing a significant leap from the 4,381 recorded in 2024.
The most recent high-profile case involved a listeria outbreak which was linked to desserts supplied to NHS hospitals and care homes earlier this year. This resulted in three deaths and two other non-fatal cases.
The reasons behind the current increase in food poisoning incidences is unclear. The Food Standards Agency believes the figures could reflect our improved ability to detect such illnesses, while others suggest that the squeeze local authority budgets, a change in importation standards and a potential weakening of regulatory focus could all be contributing factors.
But whatever the reason, a food poisoning surge spells bad news for the hospitality sector because it can have a devastating effect on any business. Besides the damage it can wreak on a restaurant’s reputation it can also lead to heavy fines and even imprisonment.
A few years ago, the owners of an Indian restaurant in Bagshot, Surrey, were ordered to pay more than £40,000 in fines, costs and compensation following a food poisoning outbreak.
During the 2023 Rugby World Cup tournament a restaurant manager in France was charged with involuntary homicide after one of his customers died and 15 others became unwell following a meal consumed at
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his premises. And in 2024 the owner of a sushi restaurant in Majorca was given a suspended prison sentence and ordered to pay 33,000 euros in compensation after 29 of his customers fell ill after eating at his establishment.
It can sometimes be hard to prove the correlation between a diner’s illness and his or her visit to a particular restaurant. But this link may well become clearer to determine in future following the news that artificial intelligence may soon be used to analyse online restaurant reviews.
The UK Health Security Agency is exploring ways in which AI could be employed to help identify possible sources of food poisoning outbreaks in restaurants. The technology would be used to pinpoint online reports of diners’ symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting episodes and link these to specific dishes that the customer may have eaten plus where these had been consumed. The intelligence would allow the UK Health Security Agency to gather more information on rates of gastrointestinal illness which are not currently captured by existing systems.
So the stakes are potentially set to become higher than ever as restaurants strive to avoid becoming the source of a food poisoning cluster. But is there any way that such outbreaks can be avoided?
The microbes that cause food poisoning are usually controlled by processes such as freezing and heating. However, these same microbes can easily be spread
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