DENVER, June 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Until now, restaurants wanting to improve or ensure food safety knowledge needed to design their own educational plan or rely on expensive, time consuming courses.

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DiningGrades.com, a national leader in promoting clean dining, is now offering free Food Safety Courses in English and Spanish. Successful completion leads to certification.

Unfortunately due to lack of food safety training and awareness most restaurants will, at some point, have FDA Food Code food safety violations. Violations can cause food borne illness. A free educational program is desperately needed.

About 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from food borne diseases, according estimates from the CDC. 60% of these illnesses occur from restaurant dining.

Selected food safety research highlights important key problems:

• According to State and Federal Environmental Health Specialists, an ill food handler causes nearly 50% of all restaurant-related outbreaks.
• According to the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, 63% of the restaurant workers admitted that they have worked sick, often with vomiting and diarrhea.
• Food handlers fail to wash their hands after handling raw ground beef In 49% of restaurants.

Dr. Harlan Stueven, an ER Doctor with nearly four decades medical experience and founder of DiningGrades.com, collaborated with Bruce Kress, a registered state sanitarian to create the courses, testing and certification to address this need.

Bruce Kress R.S. has inspected for multiple municipalities in his forty-year career and certified over 2,000 food handlers in the food service industry.

"My goal, as a registered sanitation expert, is to keep food handlers and servers aware of the latest health codes and food safety practices, in order to protect not only the public, but also the foodvendor." Bruce Kress, R.S.

Restaurant owners or management cannot afford to ignore food safety. 

• 29% of restaurant patrons would never return to a restaurant if the restrooms were dirty.
• In the 1993 Jack in the Box food poisoning epidemic, insurers paid over $98 Million to those injured.

"We offer two free food safety courses, a refresher for food handlers and a basic course for entry level servers. The courses stress the importance of food safety, causes of food borne illness and underscore key fundamentals of the FDA Food Code. DiningGrades.com is committed to improving food safety and the public health" Dr. Stueven.

Dining Grades LLC, founded in 2010, has thousands of users and hundreds of thousand of ratings in all 50 states. The mission is to promote food safety by increasing public awareness and formation of partnerships within the food industry. Designed by physicians and a health department inspector, DiningGrades.com also offers the dining public a tool to grade restaurants on cleanliness, satisfaction and recommendation.

With release of free Food Safety educational programs and certification of food handlers, DiningGrades.com is seeking to impact on this epidemic by helping the food industry improve sanitation knowledge within its workforce.

Contact:
Harlan A Stueven MD, Founder
262 227 9829 
Email

SOURCE Dining Grades LLC