Health department violations in restaurants by ownership and format types

This study takes an initial step toward understanding the relationship between food safety performance and the foodservice establishment. In our analyses, we found that the more centralized the ownership structure (and thus marketing channel), the better it performed on food safety procedures. In addition, the level of service complexity (limited/full) was found to be inversely related to food safety performance. The more centralized marketing channels, with their greater size, are better able to efficiently and effectively develop food safety resources and disseminate this information to individual restaurants.