Limitations & Considerations

While our food safety benchmarking system provides valuable insights into restaurant performance, it's important to understand its limitations and the factors that should be considered when interpreting the results. This section outlines key points to keep in mind when using our benchmarks.

Potential Limitations in Our Methodology

1. Crowdsourcing (Self-Reported Data):

   • While crowdsourcing offers unique real-time insights directly from consumers, we recognize the inherent challenges, such as variability in report quality and potential biases. We mitigate these limitations through rigorous data moderation and quality controls, and continuous refinement of our methodologies. With these controls in place, we have a proven track record of detecting outbreaks in real time (examples here) and providing critical benchmarking insights (case study here), earning industry and public health adoption, with over 500 health agencies globally subscribed to our services.

2. Attribution Challenges:

   • Attribution issues, such as last meal bias and the absence of medical diagnoses in many reports, can complicate the process of linking foodborne illnesses to specific brands. We operate under two key assumptions:

     • These biases affect all brands proportionally, with no single brand being more susceptible than others.

     • These biases remain relatively consistent over time, barring significant changes in reporting methods or public awareness.

   • While these factors may influence absolute numbers, they do not undermine the validity of relative comparisons between brands or trend analyses over time. This consistency allows for meaningful benchmarking and trend identification despite the inherent data limitations.

3. Estimations for Private Companies:

   • For private companies, we often rely on estimates for metrics such as revenue and store counts. Although we strive for accuracy, these estimates introduce a degree of uncertainty that must be considered when interpreting the results.

4. Timing of Financial Data:

   • Our reliance on 10-K reports for financial & location data may understate or overstate metrics for businesses that had significant growth or contraction during a fiscal year. Additionally, not all financial years end at the same time. We adjust our analysis to the most appropriate timeframe, and believe that as long as this adjustment is applied consistently, it does not impact the validity of the benchmarks.