Food inspection violations/By the Numbers
Fast facts about the 33,226 standard food inspection violations reported in Montgomery County from Jan. 2, 2009, to Feb. 14, 2014:
• The restaurant owner that had the most violations was GZK Incorporated, a Dayton company that owns 19 Arby’s Roast Beef, Famous Recipe Chicken and Lee’s Famous Recipe franchises. Those establishments have prompted 806 violations since 2009, 204 of which were in critical code categories.
• The top GZK violator was the Arby’s at 5899 N. Main St. in Dayton, which had 94 violations, 21 critical.
• 178 of the violation comments, about 0.6 percent of inspections, mentioned droppings or feces, mostly from mice or birds.
• 142 violations mentioned roaches, ants or bugs.
• The top hospital violator was Grandview Hospital with 72 violations, 27 critical.
• Good Samaritan Hospital had 52 violations, 21 critical. Its coffee shop had 16 violations, two critical.
Find out how many violations every food establishment in Montgomery County has received since 2009, and read inspector comments, at MyDaytonDailyNews.com.
Find out how many violations every food establishment in Montgomery County has received since 2009, and read inspector comments, at MyDaytonDailyNews.com.
Find out how many violations every food establishment in Montgomery County has received since 2009, and read inspector comments, at MyDaytonDailyNews.com.
Find out how many violations every food establishment in Montgomery County has received since 2009, and read inspector comments, at MyDaytonDailyNews.com.
Food safety violations reported by Montgomery County public health inspectors have dropped by more than 11 percent during the past five years as the number of inspections and public access to inspection records have increased, a Dayton Daily News investigation has found.
Since the beginning of 2009, when Public Health Dayton & Montgomery County began keeping inspection reports in a database, inspectors have conducted close to 30,000 restaurant and food establishment inspections. They have found more than 33,000 violations, the newspaper’s data analysis found.
The good news for patrons of the county’s restaurants, cafeterias, caterers and other establishments is that the violations per year have decreased by 800 — from 6,938 in 2009 to 6,138 last year.
Meanwhile, the 6,123 inspections conducted by the county’s 16 sanitarians last year was up almost 11 percent from 2009 and 7.7 percent from 2012.
Alan Pierce, supervisor of general services and environmental health for the health department, said the increased frequency of inspections is helping drive down violations.
“I would think that increased time spent on a program, and a more frequent appearance by us … might help in getting the points across, and therefore lower violation numbers,” Pierce said.
But restaurant inspections also have become more public. The health department began in 2008 posting inspection reports online and this newspaper began publishing them in 2012.
“I think operators are realizing that this is a public and such an available record, that possibly that might be lending itself to better compliance,” Pierce said.
Critical violations down
Shanon Morgan, president of the Miami Valley Restaurant Association, agrees that the online publishing of inspection reports is putting pressure on owners.
But, like many restaurant owners, she has concerns about posted violations, either online or in restaurant inspection reports published in the Daily News Neighbors sections. Many of the violations, Morgan said, have little to do with food safety.
“I think when you see in the paper, ‘Oh this restaurant has four violations,’ it might not be anything that has anything to do with being unclean or with there being any kind of risk of anyone eating there, or anything like that,” Morgan said.
The numbers support Morgan. About 40 percent of the 31,340 violations found by sanitarians in the county from the beginning of 2009 through Feb. 14, 2014, were categorized as “critical.”
Critical violations — identified by federal and state authorities as the most potentially hazardous to customers’ health — involve such things as employee hand-washing and illness, proper sources of food and water, proper food storage and cooking, and proper dishwashing.
In 2013, the county’s 16 sanitarians found 2,408 critical violations. That was a 4.3 percent decrease from 2009, and 5.2 percent fewer than in 2012.
But more importantly for diners: Not one outbreak of foodborne illness has been documented among the county’s 2,600 food establishments during the five-year period.
The last outbreak — when one person died and 78 others got sick from E. coli contamination at a picnic in Germantown on July 3, 2012 — was not at a licensed event subject to health department inspection.
The most recent outbreaks at establishments inspected by the department occurred 10 years ago.
In 2004, there were four documented cases of food poisoning: at the Dayton Convention Center (275 cases); at a private luncheon at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (31 cases); at the now-closed Alex’s Continental Inn in Miamisburg (eight cases); and at O’Charleys on Miamisburg-Centerville Road (seven cases).
Many are squeaky clean
Since the beginning of 2009, almost 40 percent (1,336) of the 3,461 food establishments that have been inspected in the county have had no critical violations. And about one-fifth have had no violations of any kind.
Among those with the most inspections and no violations:
• Belmont Bakery and Catering on Watervliet Avenue in Dayton (19 inspections, 0 violations)
• Timberlane School lunchroom (16 inspections)
• Shiloh Church, Philadelphia Drive (15 inspections)
• Marion’s Piazza, Shroyer Road (14 inspections)
• United Dairy Farmers, Wyoming Street (14 inspections)
• Jimmy John’s, Brown Street, (14 inspections)
• Dewey’s Pizza, Jasper Street, (14 inspections)
Michael Harris, store manager of the Marion’s Piazza at 711 Shroyer Road, said the cleanliness ethic goes back to the iconic Dayton restaurant’s founder, Marion Glass.
“When Marion was still alive, he was very specific how things needed to be done,” said Harris, 38, who worked at the Shroyer location, the oldest in the Dayton-based chain, when he was in high school.
“Marion was very smart when he went with the open kitchen idea, because he let the customers see what we were doing. So we’ve always had to be on our toes.”
During a tour of the kitchen and storage room areas, Harris talked about the weekly and monthly cleaning checklist, the regular monitoring of thermometers, how food is stored and labeled, and how the sinks are used — all points of interest for health department inspectors.
With zero violations in at least the past five years, the system is working.
“We all take responsibility,” Harris said. “The managers and employees all take pride in their job.”
John Motte, third-generation owner of Belmont Bakery & Catering on Watervliet Avenue, also credited the business founder, his grandfather.
“We just put in place what we know to do that’s good,” said Motte, 48, who has not had a food inspection violation during the five years he’s run the business.
Motte, who has been working at the store full-time since he was 18, has had time to get his system right.
“We know how to clean things and clean as you go,” he said. “I’ve just done what my father told me and what my grandfather told him.”
Health department officials say managers like Harris and Motte are critical to keeping establishments clean. Ohio food code calls them “persons in charge.”
“The safety of the public depends on the person in charge and whether or not they know what they’re doing,” said Bill Wharton, health department spokesman. “That’s the person that’s in the operation 24-7. When the business is open, that person is responsible for that operation.”
According to the food code, the person in charge must have taken a food preparation and safety course that has been approved by the state or county, said county sanitarian Sara Pitts during a recent inspection of Hot Head Burritos in Englewood.
Clean food operations usually come from good managers, she said.
“That’s the person who is going to catch their employees doing something that may not be a proper activity while we’re not here,” Pitts said.
Pitts found three violations during a 45-minute inspection of the Hot Head shop, none of them classified as critical. She found some food material buildup on two non-food contact surfaces, a small surface area on a counter that needed to be resealed so it could be thoroughly cleaned, and two spray bottles of cleaning fluid that were not labeled.
Three non-critical violations, Pitts said, was “pretty good.”
Pitts, who has a bachelor’s degree in natural resources/environmental science and a master’s in public administration, said she rarely sees restaurants or food establishments with no violations at all.
“I’ll see them on Level 1 operations, which tend to be retail stores that sell packaged food that just needs to keep cold,” Pitts said. “And I will see them in small school cafeterias.”
But what about places like Marion’s and Belmont Bakery and Catering that have none?
“Then I would say they have a very good person in charge,” she said.
Repeat problems
Not all restaurants consistently avoid violations. In 2013, for example, no establishment had more than the Shiloh Athletic Club on North Main Street in Dayton. The private club got 45 violations — 15 critical — from 13 inspections last year.
During the five-year period, the club incurred 131 violations, third most in the county.
Daniel Studebaker, one of three owners of the club, said they “comply immediately” with any violations.
Violations, he said, are part of the deal when operating in an old establishment. The club, which has been open six years, was the Shuckin’ Shack for decades, and was Saxon’s before that, he said.
“Just the other day, water backed up and spilled out on the floor,” Studebaker said. “We had to mop it up and get a cleaner out here to clean our drains.
“You know, things happen in this place. I’ve been in business my whole life and I understand how things happen, and you’ve got to fix them. That’s what we do.”
The Filling Station Sports Bar & Grill on Linden Avenue in Riverside came in second in 2013. The restaurant, currently closed, received 38 violations (17 critical) in 11 inspections in 2013. It has had 128 total violations (55 critical) since 2009.
The Golden Eagle Diner on North Dixie Drive in Dayton was No. 3 in 2013 with 35 violations (23 critical). It has gotten 92 violations (53 critical) since opening in December 2011. That was 11th on the five-year list for all violations, and third for critical violations.
At the top of the five-year list was Bolts Sports Café on Main Street in Englewood with 237 violations (99 critical).
But the sports bar has cut its violations drastically. After incurring a whopping 102 violations in 2012, Bolts cleaned up its act in 2013, with only 17 (seven critical).
Bolts owner Jack Maio said many of the violations piled up in 2011 and 2012 when he thought he had the restaurant sold, and had backed away from day-to-day operations. When the sale fell through in 2012, Maio said he embarked on a “restaurant impossible cleanup.”
“In the past two years, we have rededicated ourselves,” Maio said. “We fixed the bathrooms. We fixed the sinks. We fixed the drains. We fixed the tile. We’ve repainted the entire inside of the restaurant. We took the kitchen apart.
“We’re proud of the things we’ve done. It’s our 20th anniversary this year. We think it’s fabulous that we’ve survived. We must be doing something right.”
Pitts, who also inspects Bolts, agreed that the restaurant seems to have turned things around.
“They’ve done a thorough cleaning and a little bit of remodeling, which helps,” Pitts said. “Some of their violations were due to the fact that the building is old.”
In addition, she said, Bolts was having a lot of staff turnover during the trouble period. But since that time, she said, they’ve sent two employees to the county’s food safety course and have conducted training for everyone in the facility.
Increased scrutiny
Part of the reason violations are down in the county could be because the health department put more emphasis on food inspections at the beginning of 2013, said Pierce, a state-licensed sanitarian since 1980.
A state agency last year took over inspection and licensing of county’s 33 mobile home parks, he said, so the department decided to put the extra time of its sanitarians into inspections of food establishments designated as higher risks.
The food code defines four risk levels depending on how an establishment cooks, reheats and serves food. Higher risk are levels 3 and 4, which includes restaurants, cafeterias, caterers, hospitals and nursing homes.
Making the violations more public — which is happening across the state — could also be having an effect.
The Ohio Department of Health currently is pushing a program to get the state's 124 health districts to use its new licensing and inspection reporting system, and to post inspection reports on its web portal. Currently, 13 health districts post food inspection reports at www.healthspace.com/odh.
A statewide trend analysis has not been conducted because the state doesn’t have the data yet, said Jamie Higley, food safety program administrator for the state health department.
But Higley, who serves on a food protection committee for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said health districts in the U.S. and Canada report drops in violations when they are posted online.
Higley said an even bigger influence could be the quality of inspections.
“The local health departments are not just there to inspect and regulate,” Higley said. “They’re also there to educate and provide consultation. So I would say that’s a big factor.”
Morgan, of the Miami Valley Restaurant Association, said increased inspections probably also play a part.
“I’m sure it’s just like anything else,” Morgan said. “You don’t speed on certain roads where you know there are police.”
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