Foodservice establishments continue to cause the greatest number of foodborne illness outbreaks (approximately 60 percent) every year among all causes of foodborne outbreaks in the U.S. When I published the first article on the need for foodservice establishments to focus on achieving active managerial control of food safety risk in 2016,1 I reported then that 60 percent of all foodborne disease outbreaks in the U.S. were caused by foodservice establishments [as reported then by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)].
Today, when you look at the most currently available data (2020) on the number of foodborne disease outbreaks caused per year by foodservice establishments,2 nothing has changed. According to this data, there were 184 outbreaks (out of 299 total = 61 percent), 3,074 illnesses, 337 hospitalizations, and three deaths caused by foodservice establishments in one year.