Grocery store food bars not monitored like restaurants

Grocery store shoppers attracted to the increasingly popular salad bars and steam tables of ready-to-eat foods have a more difficult time than restaurant patrons in determining whether the food is safe or the facilities meet sanitary standards.

That’s because Georgia uses separate agencies to inspect them, and those agencies have different public reporting requirements.

INSPECTION REPORTS

To get copies of Georgia Agriculture Department inspection reports for your local grocery store, contact:

Shirley King, Open Records Administrator
Georgia Department of Agriculture, Suite 247
19 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive S.W., Atlanta, GA 30334

sking@agr.state.ga.us
404-656-3608
Fax: 404-656-4894

IN OTHER STATES
North Carolina: Local health departments inspect food service areas — such as salad bars and delis and meat departments — in grocery stores, while the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inspects the other parts of those stores.

Tennessee: The state's Agriculture Department contracts with urban county health departments to inspect grocery stores that sell ready-to-eat foods, and it publicly posts inspection reports for grocery stores online. Those reports include point scores.

Florida: State Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inspects grocery stores and posts its findings online. The stores receive ratings of "good," "fair," or "poor." Poor is a failing grade, which triggers a follow-up inspection, usually a week or two later.

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Local health departments inspect restaurants, and the state requires eateries to post the reports prominently on site, using a clear point system and letter grade.

The state Agriculture Department — the same state agency that was responsible for inspecting the peanut plant linked to the nation’s deadly salmonella outbreak — inspects grocery stores. But it doesn’t issue points or grades, and stores don’t have to post their most recent report.

The Agriculture Department inspectors do their work much the same way local health departments check up on restaurants, using basically the same form.

No one is saying this setup has contributed to food-borne illnesses or that grocery-prepared food is less trustworthy. But food safety advocates question whether it’s a good idea to have different approaches to measuring the same standards.

“Once they know that an inspection report is going to be published, there is an incentive created to make food safety a priority,” said Sarah Klein , of the food safety program at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It is something you have to do because, otherwise, your business … will suffer.”

If you want to see your local grocery store’s inspection report, you could ask the state Agriculture Department for a copy. In contrast, some local health departments post their restaurant reports online. Agriculture Department officials say they are considering the same approach.

Grocery stores, meanwhile, are offering more prepared foods through sushi counters, pasta bars, soup stations and buffets complete with chicken wings, mashed potatoes and green beans. Some stores offer tables for customers to dine in.

Rich Chey, owner of HomeGrown Restaurant Concepts, said the differences in inspections for grocery stores and restaurants raise some fairness issues.

“A good portion of our business is takeout, which is obviously what … supermarkets are trying to do themselves,” said Chey, whose company includes four restaurants in Atlanta: Osteria 832 Pasta & Pizza, Stella Neighborhood Trattoria, and two Doc Chey’s Noodle House locations. “It certainly seems like it would be more fair to the restaurants if everyone was playing by the same rules.”

Restaurant and grocery store inspectors are looking for many of the same food safety problems during their visits. But there are several differences.

Agriculture Department employees, for example, must inspect entire grocery stores complete with delis, salad bars and bakeries, while examining the shelves for out-of-date food. They even check the store’s scales and scanners for accuracy, so their inspections can be more complex and time-consuming than restaurant inspections.

Over the last several decades, the state agency has grappled with the growth of the food industry in Georgia. In the 1970s, the Agriculture Department had 100 inspectors to check on 9,000 businesses, said Van Harris, of the state agency’s consumer protection division. Now there are 60 inspectors for about 16,420 such businesses, including food processing plants, grocery stores, convenience stores and seafood shops, state records show. About 10 positions are now vacant because of budget constraints, according to the department.

In contrast, the East Metro Health District — which covers Gwinnett, Newton and Rockdale counties — has 17 inspectors who are primarily responsible for inspecting 2,600 food service establishments, plus seven more inspectors who can help out.

The Agriculture Department has also reduced the minimum number of inspections it does per business. It did four inspections of each business per year in the 1970s and 1980s, Harris said. Now they do at least two, Harris said. That would require them to conduct at least 545 inspections a year — about one every 3 1/2 hours, including travel time, each working day of the year.

“I don’t know how in the world you would cross-train them to be jacks-of-all-trades and expect them to protect the public health,” said Donna Rosenbaum, executive director of the Illinois-based consumer advocacy group STOP, or Safe Tables Our Priority. “There are different issues between food processing plants and ready-to-eat food service operations.”

Prior to 2001, both the Agriculture Department and public health officials sent employees to inspect grocery stores and other shops that offer packaged goods as well as prepared foods, Harris said. But with encouragement from retailers, they agreed to split up the work, Harris said.

“Why have two inspectors come in to do one job we both do anyway?” Harris said. “It was a waste of resources.”

Besides, Harris said, inspectors from his state agency are required to have the same minimum qualifications as local health department inspectors. They also use roughly the same inspection forms, based on the federal food safety code. The Agriculture Department asked state legislators earlier this year for money to hire three more inspectors and a supervisor. The department wants to make those new inspectors, plus two existing ones, focus on inspecting food processing plants. The rest of the inspectors would focus on retail food businesses.

State agriculture officials are also considering doing fewer checks for outdated nonperishable foods in grocery stores so they can spend more time inspecting food preparation areas. They stress, however, that they would continue to monitor perishable items, especially milk, eggs, prepackaged sandwiches, baby formula and shellfish.

“We are looking at everything we do and how we can best protect the food supply in this state,” said Oscar Garrison, the state’s assistant agriculture commissioner for consumer protection.

At the Peanut Corporation of America plant in South Georgia, Garrison’s colleagues cited numerous unsanitary conditions there from 2006 through 2008: standing water that could breed bacteria, mildew on walls of food production areas, gaps in doors and walls where rodents could enter. But they never recognized patterns that led to the extensive contamination that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now documented.

State regulations treat grocery stores and restaurants similarly when it comes to addressing food-borne illnesses. They both must shut down operations affected by the “onset of an apparent food-borne illness outbreak” and notify authorities.

Mike Emkin, who manages the restaurant and bakery in the DeKalb Farmers Market in Decatur, said he supports the way the system works now in Georgia. The Agriculture Department’s inspectors said the market complied with all requirements during their 8 1/2-hour visit on June 27. But their report notes several other issues, including “debris buildup” on the baking room’s exhaust fans, cleared up the next week. “They are tough. They do a thorough job,” Emkin said of the inspectors. “I have a lot of confidence in them.”

Some stores don’t rely solely on the state inspections. Whole Foods Market, which sells ready-to-eat salads, fruits, meats and soups, contracts with a private firm to audit its food safety techniques, said Darrah Horgan, spokeswoman for the chain’s southern region.

“We want to make sure we are putting out the best quality.”

Staff writer Alan Judd contributed to this report.