Food inspection reports draw a lot of interest online

By Kaye Spector
Plain Dealer Health and Medical Writer

People with a hunger for information about their favorite eateries
flocked to the Cleveland Health Department’s online database of food
inspection reports after the site went live on Monday.

The database was so popular that users crashed the site shortly after 6
p.m., Director Matt Carroll said.

By midday Wednesday, more than 17,000 visitors had visited the site,
clevelandhealth.org. There were 52,647 page views of the inspection
reports, which are the department’s food safety assessment of
Cleveland restaurants, grocery stores and other food vendors.

Many spent 30 minutes looking over the pages.

Health officials are happy. One of their goals is to decrease the
number of foodborne illnesses by educating consumers about where they
are buying prepared food.

“I think it's a curiosity,” Carroll said. “But we hope it becomes
more in the vigilance category where people are choosing where to go
based on the food safety issues.”

That might encourage health officials' other aim: to increase food
vendors' motivation to comply with food safety laws.

Commissioner Willie Bess said he's already heard from one grocery store
owner without violations who called to ask what he needed to do to
maintain his high level of operation.

“That's good,” Bess said.

Some early visitors to the site found it difficult to navigate. The
Health Department tweaked the pages to eliminate a step.

Others complained that they couldn't find their favorite restaurant,
which Carroll said might be explained by two reasons: One, the
restaurant might have been inspected in the first half of 2009 and had
no violations. The other reason might be to search by a restaurant's
name you have to get it exactly right. For example, if you type Big Egg
(no “The”) in the name box, you won't be able to pull up a report
for the restaurant. The end-around is to search for the restaurant's
name in the text search box.

Dorothy Gaughan, 81, has never gotten sick from eating at a restaurant,
but she wants to know how her favorite eateries fared with the Health
Department.

“At our age, you get sick quick,” she said. “You have to be a
little more careful.”

The North Olmsted resident used to follow TV news reports about unsafe
restaurants but likes the ideas of having the information readily
available on the Internet.

“I'm anxious to get on there and check and see,” she said. “It'll
be really interesting to find out.”