Food Cooling

Key takeaways from three scientific studies

Federal guidelines recommend several practices for cooling food, but not all restaurants follow them. Our findings indicate that food safety programs and restaurants can improve cooling practices by:

• Focusing intervention efforts on independent and smaller restaurants
• Following the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Food Code cooling guidelines (which say to actively monitor cooling food and to cool food in shallow, ventilated pans)
• Encouraging or requiring kitchen managers to be certified in food safety

Why this is important

Hot food needs to be cooled quickly to prevent foodborne illness outbreaks caused by germs. Ten years of data (1998 to 2008) show 504 outbreaks of foodborne illness in restaurants were caused by hot food cooled too slowly.

What we learned

• Common gaps in restaurant cooling practices include failure to use methods that help food cool quickly. These gaps include:
  • Not monitoring the temperature of food in cooling process. One in 7 restaurants stored foods in refrigerators above 41°F
  • Storing food in cooling process in containers deeper than 3 inches. Four in 10 restaurants placed hot foods in these kinds of containers
  • Not ventilating food in cooling process. One in 4 restaurants did not loosely cover food in cooling process to ventilate and protect it from contamination

• Restaurants with certified kitchen managers and that were chain-owned were more likely to use methods that help food cool quickly.

• Foods cooled more quickly if they were cooled according to to FDA guidelines:
  • Actively monitored during cooling
  • Stored in pans at shallow depths
  • Stored in ventilated pans

More Information

• Journal articles this plain language summary is based on: Analysis of cooling practices, characteristics of cooling methods, and cooling practices
• More key findings on restaurant practices and from investigation data