Too Much Power to the People? A Food Safety Site Tests the Limits
Too Much Power to the People? A Food Safety Site Tests
the Limits
Several national chain restaurants have been the target
of complaints on IWasPoisoned.com since the site began in 2009.
By KEVIN ROOSE FEB. 13, 2018
Dan Laptev, an electronics analyst, was making his way
through the Charlotte, N.C., airport this month when he stopped at Starbucks
for a light dinner — a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate. He
ate, drank, boarded his flight and got home. And that’s when the trouble
started.
Mr. Laptev spent much of that night hunched over the
toilet with a violently upset stomach. Suspecting his Starbucks meal as the
source of his ills, he sent a complaint through the company’s website, but got
only an automated form email back. So he did the next best thing: He logged on
to his computer and went to IWasPoisoned.com, a website that allows users to
post reports of food poisoning, and submitted his saga.
“I wanted to let people know to stop eating at
Starbucks,” he told me.
This is the era of internet-assisted consumer revenge,
and as scorned customers in industries from dentistry to dog-walking have used
digital platforms to broadcast their displeasure, the balance of power has
tipped considerably in the buyer’s favor.
This is especially true of IWasPoisoned, which has
collected about 89,000 reports since it opened in 2009. Consumers use the site
to decide which restaurants to avoid, and public health departments and food
industry groups routinely monitor its submissions, hoping to identify outbreaks
before they spread. The site has even begun to tilt stocks, as traders on Wall
Street see the value of knowing which national restaurant chain might soon have
a food-safety crisis on its hands.
Not everyone is happy about the added transparency.
Restaurant executives have criticized IWasPoisoned for allowing anonymous and
unverified submissions, which they say leads to false reports and irresponsible
fear-mongering. Some public health officials have objected on the grounds that
food poisoning victims can’t be trusted to correctly identify what made them
sick.
“It’s not helping food safety,” said Martin Wiedmann, a
professor of food safety at Cornell University. “If you want to trace
food-borne illness, it needs to be done by public health departments, and it
needs to include food history.”
Rating your Uber driver or Airbnb host is one thing. But
when it comes to matters of public health, is there such a thing as giving too
much power to the people?
Patrick Quade, IWasPoisoned’s founder, told me that he
started the site after, he said, he got food poisoning from a B.L.T. wrap he
bought at a Manhattan deli. At the time, Mr. Quade, now 46, was working as an
interest rates trader at Morgan Stanley. He figured that other people might
want a place to report food-borne illnesses quickly and anonymously, without
the ordeal of filing a complaint with the local health department.
At first, the submissions trickled in, mostly from diners
who had meals at small local restaurants. But national chains like McDonald’s,
Subway and Starbucks popped up as well. Dunkin’ Brands, the parent company of
Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, saw its stock fall 2.4 percent last July
after traders on Wall Street circulated reports of a food-poisoning incident at
one of the chain’s stores, according to the financial news site Benzinga. (The
stock quickly recovered, and no widespread food-safety problem was ever
confirmed.) Other national chains have also started their own investigations
after reports appeared on the site, according to Mr. Quade.
No restaurant chain has felt the IWasPoisoned effect more
than Chipotle. In 2015, users of the site began posting reports of food
poisoning from a Chipotle location in Simi Valley, Calif. Eventually, it became
clear that they were part of a larger norovirus outbreak, one of many food
safety issues that would haunt Chipotle for the next couple of years, cutting
its stock price in half and eventually forcing the resignation of its chief
executive.
“I could tell that Chipotle was a problem brand,” Mr.
Quade said. “The rate of reporting was averaging nine or 10 times higher than
other brands. It was a really powerful leading indicator.”
One day last summer, Chipotle’s stock fell more than 5
percent after reports that a store in Virginia had been the subject of multiple
IWasPoisoned complaints. Another cluster of reports in December sent the stock
down 3 percent. In both cases, Chipotle found no evidence of a wider outbreak,
and conspiracy-minded industry watchers began wondering if short-sellers were
deliberately sabotaging the company by submitting false reports in hopes of
causing a stock scare.
“Reports made to these third-party reporting sites have
no clinical validation, are made anonymously, and are unreliable,” Chris
Arnold, a Chipotle spokesman, said in an emailed statement. “We constantly
monitor all available sources of information — including social media platforms
and third-party reporting websites — to ensure we are aware of any allegation
of illness, and we have robust procedures in place to look into any claims that
are made.”
After the 2015 Chipotle incident drew attention to the
site, Mr. Quade realized that IWasPoisoned could become a real business. He quit
his job at Morgan Stanley, and began to work on the site full time. He now has
three employees, a handful of remote contractors and a makeshift office at a
co-working space in Manhattan. The company makes less than $20,000 per month in
revenue, but Mr. Quade expects that to grow. Soon, he plans to release a mobile
app, which will alert a user when walking near a restaurant with an active food
poisoning complaint.
As it has matured, IWasPoisoned has developed an unusual
business model that reflects Mr. Quade’s Wall Street roots. Power users — like,
say, a hedge fund that can profit from knowing about an E. coli outbreak at a
major restaurant chain ahead of the rest of the market — pay up to $5,000 a
month for real-time alerts whenever a new report is posted to the site. (Free
alerts are also available, but they come only once a day.) Only a handful of
clients pay for the premium service, but more have expressed interest in
signing up, Mr. Quade said.
“The investment community is more attuned to food safety
than ever before,” he said.
Health officials and restaurant executives are also using
the site to spot early signs of trouble. According to Mr. Quade, public health
agencies in 46 states and representatives from more than half of the top 50 restaurant
chains in America subscribe to the site’s daily email alerts. More than 25,000
consumers subscribe to the emails as well.
On average, the site now receives 150 complaints a day,
and every new report is manually reviewed by a staff member before posting to
make sure it is at least plausible. The site weeds out obvious hoaxes and joke
submissions, and uses technology like IP tracking to help stop users from
submitting multiple reviews of the same restaurant.
“With every report, our promise is to make sure it’s a
real person who believes they have food poisoning,” Mr. Quade said.
One of those words — “believes” — is perhaps the food
industry’s biggest problem with IWasPoisoned. Food safety experts told me that
food poisoning victims are prone to what epidemiologists call “recall bias.” A
person who gets a violent stomach bug will naturally attribute it to the last
thing he or she ate, especially if it came from a restaurant with a history of
food-safety issues. But often, given the slow-developing nature of many
food-borne illnesses, the culprit is something eaten days earlier, or something
entirely unrelated.
“A web page like this doesn’t ask what disease you got,
or the timing of it,” Professor Wiedmann of Cornell said. “All of that gets
lost.”
Mr. Quade conceded that point, saying that “we don’t go
out and conduct medical tests” on submissions, and that users’ accounts might
not always be reliable. The site allows restaurants to appeal a report, he
said, if it has evidence that a customer is lying or mistaken, and it pulls
reports off its website after 30 days to limit their reputational damage.
But he said that the site’s reports were still valuable
as data points to consider in context. And, he added, users want a place to
complain.
“They’ll do it, whether we exist or not,” he said. “If
we’re not there, they’ll just go to Twitter or Facebook.”
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