Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Patrick Quade: On that point, one of the things that we do, which we think is super cool is we benchmark. So we've selected 10 brands, the national US food chains, household names that represent about 70, 000 stores. And over time, we've measured how many foodborne illness reports we get citing, like, against that cohort to come up with an average, like, a kind of an average amount of food poisoning that comes in for using that as a benchmark.

And then we can compare brands to that to say, well, are you getting more than average? Like, a lot more than average? Are you better than average? And how are you trending over time? And so back to the Chipotle, we could tell in 2012, they had a rate of reporting that was 10 to 20 times higher than our benchmark, not 10 to 20%, 10 to 20 times high consistently every month for over 20 months.

Or longer leading up to that first outbreak. Everybody's

intro: got to eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points, from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine L. Shaw and Matt Ragushi for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop.

Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello, hello, Francine. Hello, Matt. We have a very exciting guest today. We are at the IEHA conference, FDA conference. And it's just filled with a lot of really interesting people. But Francine and I got to briefly meet this guy, who's going to introduce himself in a sec. And he has a fascinating website and an amazing story that really is going to hit homes both for our food safety nerds here, but also for a lot of the consumers and consumers.

Because actually, I think your website is not utilized enough or known enough and we would love for you to get this out there. So please introduce yourself, give us an idea of what it is that you do and why you're here.

Patrick Quade: Great to meet you both. And thanks so much for having me on. And my name is Patrick White.

I'm the founder of buywaspoisoned. com. It's a food safety crowdsourcing website. We allow people to come to the website, Report a food safety issue, and we use that data to detect outbreaks, to detect clusters, trends, and we have, as participants, we have consumers who subscribe to our data, so we have a free subscription for consumers to get alerts for their area.

We have public health agencies, we have 500 public health agencies globally, we operate in seven languages natively, and we cover around 95 percent of the United States by population in terms of public health. That's either county, state, local and federal and we have provide industry services. So for food safety.

For brands that are interested in understanding how are they trending versus their peers? Do they have a hotspot benchmarking custom care and customer outreach, customer recovery, and the audience to be, yeah,

Matt Regusci: that's awesome. Patrick. Okay. So you were telling us the story of how you launched this site a little bit about your past and.

What drove you to create the website, I Was Poisoned, and where'd you get that name, I Was Poisoned? So,

Patrick Quade: so, so, how it started, my background has nothing to do with food safety, microbiology, science, absolutely nothing. I was, banking is my background, so, I ate a sandwich from a deli in Tribeca, New York, where I lived at the time, and I was, Absolutely flattened.

I was like, so sick. It was like, I remember this moment, like it's so distinctly even now. And in the depths of that horror, I was like, I'm going to do something. Do you know what it was? But it's, I'm not just going to let, let this pass. So my do something was like. A pretty low bar. It was called the place and let them know what happened.

And so it wasn't anything like

Matt Regusci: it just called the deli and be like, dude, I got sick.

Patrick Quade: Yeah. So that was my to do. And as soon as I wasn't yelling or screaming or shouting, I was just letting them know that I think that that was something. And as soon as I mentioned the word food poisoning, it was click. I hung up the phone.

Matt Regusci: So you just called the deli and was like, Hey, I think I got sick from your sandwich. And then they were just hung up. I hung up

Patrick Quade: and I was like, wait a second. That's not right. Okay, now I'm doing something extra. I didn't know what that was. And I was like, there should be a website for this. And, and I'm not even an engineer.

That's not my technology is my background. So I was like, I'm going to make a website. If there was a website that people could report where they got ill from, then it would allow people to see if others were getting sick from there, and then they could avoid it. Or better still, whoever management or senior management of the deli, if there was senior manager of the deli, I'm not sure how the deli network works in New York, could do something about it, could actually be proactive and follow up about it.

So, and how it was I was poisoned, even when I started the site squatters, websites, squatters were like domain name squatters were around. And I was like, thinking of obvious things and they were all taken. And I was like, Oh, geez. And then I just kept trying things and I was poisoned was available. And I was like, done.

I didn't because I wasn't launching a business. I wasn't launching a company. I was just like. This needs to happen. I'm doing it. I don't know if it's going to go anywhere, but I had to do it and that was good enough because I had absolutely no expectation and it was also partially an experiment. Would people come forward?

And unlike some people do extensive research, there was no extensive research. If I'd done extensive research. Even a little bit of research, I would have realized that NYC Health actually has a division that cares a great deal about food safety. They have a form. They have, there's people like that are there for you, but I simply didn't know that.

And it was okay by me because I wasn't making a huge investment. It was a few weekends. And boom, yeah, there it is, there's no marketing launch, then I was like, that was like just getting it to physically work, because I was hacking together a site in a time of, it's called low code or no code, and back then there wasn't much in the way of low code or no code coding or tools that were available, so I was using early variations of that, just simply getting it to work was like, I was patting myself on the back, that's also, that was fun, and then people started to report on it.

My God, I can't believe someone found it and got a report. Whoa, like wow. And then it spiraled

Matt Regusci: upwards from there. It really has. Okay, anybody who is curious should really check this place out. It's IWasPoisoned. com. And the first thing, it's so simple. Like when I saw this, I was like, dang. This was done by a guy who doesn't know how to code, right?

But I'm saying that as a compliment because, you know, because that

Francine Shaw: stuff

Matt Regusci: is just so overcomplicated. But you have on one third of the page is like report a food safety issue, nausea, diarrhea, see more. I want to alert health department, see more. From what the type in where it was from make it private or not and then report it.

Now it's button. It's asking five questions and a report button. And for a big portion of this page, it's just a big ass map with a bunch of numbers with like red, yellow, blue dial. And it's so cool. Like it really, truly is. Cool. And I don't know if you think of yourself as cool, but this website is pretty cool.

Patrick Quade: Oh, I'll take it. Thank you. That was like, it came in, came in pretty hot there. I got like a dig, but then it came around. So I appreciate it. But you're right. I'm still trying to pass that one out. Not sure, but I'll just, I'll roll with it. No, I appreciate it.

Matt Regusci: No, because sometimes if you're sick, first off, if you are, if you have a normal man type of syndrome and you've got fluids coming out of both ends, the last thing you want to be doing is making a big ass report.

So five questions

Patrick Quade: reporting now, boom, it's there. And that's actually what happens. Why are we like some amount of the reports are people. I'm on the, I'm typing while I'm on the toilet, literally, so we get my head in

Francine Shaw: a bucket. Yeah, literally,

Patrick Quade: like some of the people, the things that people share, people are wonderful.

It's people are wonderful. And I love every single person who spoke. It was not that many people speak up. I give talks and why am I here today? I gave a talk for this conference. Yeah. And one of the things I typically don't do this pretty frequently, just to let people know we exist, make sure the counties that aren't aware of what we do can get involved.

Yeah. Sometimes industry participates and that's how sometimes we get in contact with industry who are wanting to get insights and intel from this data. And I ask a question of the audience, like who among you have been Pit Poisoned? I actually do it on a tool that like track the numbers. It's like a live interactive thing.

And so usually, 50 60 percent of the audience has, maybe more, has said that they either had a confirmed diagnosis or they were very sure it was food poisoning. And then, and these are experts by the way, so like I put that pretty highly, rate that pretty highly if they think they had food borne illness.

And then the next question is, who reported it anyway? Extremely low percentage of even people who know that there's a division in their county or their state, even people who are fully aware don't doesn't have a high rate of reporting. So, the people that come to us are really special. They're very civic minded.

They want to speak up. They care about others and they have to do the work to find out where it can be reported. Unlike, like I say, experts who actually, you know, you know, Nowhere to go and still don't do it. I'm not picking on anyone, by the way, and I'm just we

Francine Shaw: understand completely what you mean. Most people don't report it.

First of all, most people don't understand how to report it. And then it's like, Why bother? And the majority of people don't realize that it is food poisoning. We just had this conversation a few minutes ago. They think it's the flu. Well, the flu is respiratory.

Patrick Quade: It's not diarrhea and vomiting. So there's that.

Yeah. A hundred, a hundred percent. So, yeah. So how long have you had this up and going? I think it went live and I think like 2009, I think so. But that was literally when I think it just. I think it's like turning the light on and no one was there watching. So I'm not even sure it existed, but like I said, there's no marketing, no budget.

It was just like meant live. So, and I think it might've been taken a month or two for the first report to come in. And by the way, I was working full time. Like I had no intention of leaving. Finance at that time, yeah, I just would tend to it as it got busy. And so it's been around a long time, but let's say more substantially since 2016 or 17 was when it started to traction really started to grow.

And earlier than that, actually, yeah, like 2010, 11, it was, it's been gradual, but then it's ramped up around 2016, 17. It's like, Oh my gosh,

Matt Regusci: this couple of weekend hobby ended up becoming a job.

Patrick Quade: Yeah. It became clear. There's so many constituents, so many people in speak, interested in speaking up. Yeah. So many different interested parties, including we detected the first Chipotle, major Chipotle outbreak in real time, Simi Valley in 2015, and.

And most of their subsequent outbreaks in real time, they lost 10 billion in market cap from top to bottom, from their peak at the start of their string of food poisoning outbreaks to the bottom. So we had hedge fund interest, we had financing interest, we had, obviously we had restaurant and brand interest, we had public health interest and consumer interest.

So it's okay, this is the biggest puzzle in the world. How do we create a scenario where we can do good work? And also be financially solvent, find a way to get create products that are interesting to industry because the main goal was like, we can't charge. This has to be free to consumers thousand percent, like it absolutely has to be free and by virtue of that, for the most part, it needs to be at least a free service for environmental health because they're funded by consumers.

So then it made sense that the participants in this ecosystem of eating and food and selling food pieces that have the wherewithal to most financial benefit to get involved is industry. And if we can find enough industry participants who care about. Um, consumer sentiment and this type of analysis to subscribe to services.

That's been our mission from day one. And uh, yeah, so we continue to go down that route.

Francine Shaw: So I want, I want to say a couple of things. First I'm going to preface this by saying you saw my reaction when you introduced yourself and I, so I want to preface this by saying that I'd been familiar with this since, oh my God, it's been years, like before, like the 2016, 17 that you're talking about.

So when I first heard the name, I was like. I come from retail. That's where my background is. I was like, Oh my God, that's harsh.

Patrick Quade: I think it's the worst. I mean, looking back, I really wish I hadn't named it, although it is memorable. It's memorable. But I, I, I agree. It's harsh. And I think that was a misstep.

Honestly.

Francine Shaw: No, I don't think it is. I don't think, I think it's don't eat poop. You know, it's, it's like when Matt, that was all Matt,

Matt Regusci: it's your fault because

Francine Shaw: I was like, I don't know, not sure about that. Great marketing.

Patrick Quade: Okay.

Francine Shaw: Great marketing. It really, truly is because years later then is I have evolved myself.

There couldn't probably be a better name because people are going to remember it and that's what they're going to look for. And when you're that sick, you think you were poisoned. Yeah,

yeah. And

Francine Shaw: you really were.

Yeah, yeah. In essence.

Francine Shaw: So, I think it's a great name at this point. Okay, well,

Patrick Quade: appreciate it.

Francine Shaw: Yeah.

No, I think that it's a great name.

Patrick Quade: Well, okay. One thing I was concerned about is that I was posing seems very aggressive towards the food industry. So I think some initially some industry were like, Oh, well, this is like, not a thoughtful site. Like, this is like slander because it just, it sounds like.

These people, you know, are against us, the food industry, which we're not at all. We provide services to help industry, you know, enhance the food safety practices. So, yeah.

Francine Shaw: Right. And you are providing a great service. And I feel like this is a, I want to say battle that we fight all the time with industry is, is food safety worth the cost?

I consider it an investment. And that ordeal with Chipotle was 2015, where they had those unprecedented food borne illness outbreaks. It's 2024. We're still talking about it. You are the second person we've talked to today at this point. And it's come up in both conversations. So a hundred percent, it's worth the investment.

Nine years later, we're still talking about it. People need to make the investment and prevent it, prevention rather than reaction. And I just. The mentality of being reactionary instead of preventative has got to stop. Nine years later, we're still talking about it.

Patrick Quade: Yeah, yeah, totally agree. And on that point, one of the things that we do, which we think is super cool, is we benchmark.

So we've selected 10 brands, national U. S. food chains, household names that represent about 70, 000 stores. And over time, we've measured how many foodborne illness reports we get citing, like, against that cohort to come up with an average, like, a kind of an average amount of food poisoning that comes in for using that as a benchmark.

And then we can compare brands to that to say, well, are you getting more than average? Like, a lot more than average? Are you better than average? And how are you trending over time? And so, back to the Chipotle, we could tell in 2012, they had a rate of reporting that was 10 to 20 times higher than our benchmark.

Not 10 to 20 percent,

Matt Regusci: 10

Patrick Quade: to 20 times higher consistently every month. For over 20 months or longer leading up to that first outbreak. So, so to me, that's a very powerful product if you're a brand. So I'd reached out to them at the time and they never responded. This is pre the 2015 and they were very dismissive in the press about crowdsourcing as this is.

Basically saying that there was no utility and it was actually harmful what we were doing. But from where we're sitting, we had, it was a crystal clear signal that there was something systemically wrong. Now, being that we work with experts, environmental health experts and epidemiologists. We're engineers and social media experts and data people.

That's what is what we do. We get data from one place to another and signals. We could see this. It's crystal clear. Something's wrong. We didn't know whether it was what with the suppliers that they chose them. Was it process? We just knew that there's something was a riot. It was absolutely clear. And that which we continue to today and offer to brands to say, Hey, do you want to see where you sit?

Do you want to see hotspot in a region or? In a particular product stuff like that. So we think that's a no brainer that yeah, it's it's absolutely predictive. And if they had taken heed of that information, they could have averted like that series from where we're sitting. They could have done all the work that they did after they got fined 25 million.

They could have done just some of that work a few years earlier, save the 25 million fine, and not had the whole kind of rigmarole I went through.

Francine Shaw: And it's not just the 25 million fine. No. There's so much more that was involved in that.

Matt Regusci: Yeah,

Patrick Quade: so much more. So,

Matt Regusci: yeah. So, okay. So, so many questions when it comes to this, because you're talking about how, you're not quite sure, using Chipotle as an example, right?

There was the supply chain issue. It was a bunch of actually there was neurovirus issue, but

Patrick Quade: yeah, they hadn't, I think they hit all the posts or many of the posts. There was like, yeah, a range of different things that were going on. So

Matt Regusci: when you're, when people are posting on here that they're sick, they don't really know if it was really truly, if it was that deli that they just ate from.

Or if it was salmonella from or E. coli from three days ago or listeria from six weeks ago, right? They just know that they're poisoned, that they were sick and they're posting in here. How do you distinguish that within your data sets to like, to tell the one off? Type of thing versus the total trend that is happening.

Patrick Quade: Yeah, great question. So we, there's a few pieces to, we moderate every report that comes in. So unlike it looks like a Twitter, you report it and it just goes live. It doesn't, it comes into a queue. We moderate it. We use a bunch of techniques. And the goal of that is to eliminate malicious or anything inauthentic, or we got a bunch of things that we do.

Some

Matt Regusci: employee that just got canned from someplace and puts in some sort of I was poisoned report. Yeah. Yeah. Got

Patrick Quade: it. Yeah. We had political attacks. Like there was a restaurant that read something in DC that disallowed a Republican eating or disallowed a Democrat. It was something like that. Yes. And then we had like 300 point reports against that that were Oh kidding.

Clearly like, let's like that were really, I remember that. That was, yeah. I don't remember which side was which, but it was like, okay, this is. What's going on here? In today's world, it doesn't matter. Both sides are slinging mud. So whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah. Things like that. So we've got a bunch of tech things to get rid of.

Still, even still, no matter what we do, attribution is a concern. So it might, you know, I got, I ate a KFC an hour ago and I got norovirus. Okay. So, well, you didn't. It's either not norovirus, if it was from the KFC, or if it is norovirus, it was from something you ate before that. So, now we allow those reports to go through.

Why? Environmental health cares about them, because they want to know, not necessarily It's important whether they got it from KFC or not, but if they have vomiting and diarrheal symptoms, it's maybe just as important to work in a daycare, like community staff for presenting the spread of norovirus type, and then maybe it was 72 hour food history.

So it's, any report is a starting point of a conversation, and it depends on the conversation, what the conversation is, depending on the resources, but the value beyond that is the cost. So, a singular report is, has value, like I just described, like it has value, but when you get your 10th independent household reporting for the same physical location in a 72 hour time period, that's notable.

And that's how we deal with that. It's cluster based. So, once it passes the threshold. It depends. Brands have different thresholds and even counties have different thresholds that they care about for many counties to independent households reporting about the same physical restaurant in a 48 hour time period.

I think that's considered an outbreak. I'm not sure. It's pretty low, but it's using that clustering approach. So it's how we handle that. And how often you gain those clusters every week? Wow. Yeah.

Francine Shaw: And you just answered a question that I had because I sometimes see those. Reports come through that I just ate at KFC an hour ago and I have norovirus.

We know that's not right. Okay. So we all know that's not accurate. But you just answered that question because it's important to know why they go through.

Patrick Quade: We're not scientists. We're not epidemiologists. We know enough to know that some things have at least one part of the puzzle wrong. Like I said, in that case, it wasn't either, wasn't norovirus or it wasn't.

The KFC, but the other part of how we think about it, it's today's world, people post online, this stuff's going online no matter what, they're posting it somewhere, by posting it with us. We have an opportunity to count it in consideration of all those facts and identify clusters and also the trends like the 10 to 20 times higher than our benchmark, many multiples higher.

That's a concern for a restaurant chain. Are there some false positives in that? Yeah, there are some false positives in that, but the false positives are spread evenly throughout brands. Like people don't, Make more erroneous things about one brand versus the people are just writing what, how they experience things.

So we think that if you consider some amount of haircut for that, the rest of it still has very powerful signals with that Chipotle example I provided.

Francine Shaw: Right? And the clusters that frequently are like, that's a wow.

Patrick Quade: Yeah, it's a wow. Yeah.

Francine Shaw: I'm not shocked.

Patrick Quade: Yeah, yeah.

Francine Shaw: And I'm, this is going to sound probably.

Not like I want to hear it, but it makes me, I'm not shocked. I sometimes wonder like, why don't we see these outbreaks more frequently than we do? What that tells me is that your system is working because of the stuff that I see.

Patrick Quade: Yeah, I think part of it is like Matt said, we make it simple for people to speak up.

And part of it is, like we talked about before, they're in the throes of it sometimes, you can't expect someone to fill out, write an essay and do a 72 hour food history when they're coming out both ends and they're writhing on the floor in the bathroom, but they can, they can do a text. A voice detects or we accept all different types of reporting formats, explaining it the best they can in that moment.

Log it. We actually let people come back and update it later when they're feeling better. We remind them, hey, do you want to tell us more about what happened? So we capture them when they're at their most inspired.

Francine Shaw: Wow, I'm dry heaving.

Patrick Quade: It happens. We got them. I love the determination. I feel for them. That was me.

He's

Francine Shaw: got 10 children. So when one

Patrick Quade: gets

Francine Shaw: it, like the entire household of 14, because his in laws also live there.

Patrick Quade: Okay. Okay. Yeah. You got the deep expertise on that part. Yeah.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Our water bill goes up a lot. So how many are you getting in a day?

Patrick Quade: It depends. Um, we might on an average day, it could be two to 300 reports in a day.

It can spike up to thousands depending on. What things are going on? It really depends.

Francine Shaw: Wow. It's almost October. It's about to spike. Oh jeez.

Patrick Quade: It's going to start going higher, yeah, starting now, up to through December. Through March. Well, through March. So you

Matt Regusci: do see a seasonal uptick through fall and winter then?

Patrick Quade: Yeah, so we actually have a really cool study coming out that we're doing in concert with NC State, with Leanne Jacobs, one of the top norovirus scientists, and Ben Chapman, and Rekha Galter, and others. And on our data, what we did is we, because I think some people say, well, they want to have more proof that, particularly in the public health, there's some skepticism on, of what we're doing.

It's unusual. I totally respect that there's skepticism or more, they're wanting more of a robust study of what we're doing. We're like, well, wait a second, what public data set can we look at that we can compare it to and see if our data tracks in line? So, Noristat, I don't know if you y'all are both aware of Noristat, it's a, there are around 15 states that contribute, that participate in norovirus outbreaks to the CDC and they tabulate it and they release it.

And so there's like a norovirus, it's not all states, but it's norovirus data, outbreak data, curated by the CDC, contributed by the states who participate. We're like, what if we carved all of that data? Up and said, grouped everything into all reports that have vomiting and diarrhea, which are norovirus homox of norovirus and throw out the rest.

So we're just left with this norovirus proxy type thing, like a kind of a cohort that pretty decent chance of norovirus given of widespread noroviruses. But if we take the 14, those 14 states that are the same ones in the cohort from CDC. Line them up, you know, do the math and see how they correlate. It was incredible.

It was like, it's so tightly correlated. So we have a paper coming out on that. We're doing a presentation that we got accepted to infectious disease week, which is in, uh, soon October, I think to present that. And we'll be releasing the white paper. Yeah. So I think that's a really good, super cool thing because the benefit of the way, if we can accept that our proxy.

Correlates so tightly that it could be utilized the benefit. What we have it's not on a month flag the other process. It's real time. It's not aggregated in total. It's literally to the zip code or street in facility. If there's more than 1 and it's. Not 14 states every site. So we think there's a super for brands that are interested in saying, Hey, you can do handwashing reminders every day, or you can target them when norovirus like symptoms based on crowdsource reporting are circulating higher in areas where you operate.

And we, it's part of what we do is geofence a lot for specialized situations. So brands have expressed interest in that to know that you always should screen for stuff who are not well, so they're not coming to work sick, but double down on that and just give reminders to your, for the chains to give reminders to their network of stores, stuff like that.

Right.

Francine Shaw: So we'll be releasing that publicly? Yes. So I'd love to see that.

Patrick Quade: Yeah, that's going to come out in mid third, fourth quarter, I think. Yeah, we'll be really sorry.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, great. If you can shoot us over that info, cause we would love to then have another follow up on that. Cause that would be the type of thing that our listeners would geek out on.

Okay.

Patrick Quade: Awesome. Yeah. I'll shoot it across. Okay. Well, I wish I could show you the chart. It's, it's pretty well, I was, I didn't know what happened because it's a different, And I was, I was looking at it and I was rubbing my eye. Yeah. It's so tightly correlated. I can do basic math. I can add up and whatnot. So, but I, we gave it to math people.

Banker. He's like, I can do basic math,

Matt Regusci: arithmetic, multiplication, compounding, that type of stuff.

Patrick Quade: Yeah. We had this health math doing correlation, different correlation analysis. I can do a couple of things. I can do it. Yeah. I can do more than that. I'll, but we gave it to independently verify. I guess that's the main point and put it through the ringer.

And yeah,

Matt Regusci: that's where we're excited about it. Yeah. And you said 50 states, but we have listeners in every continent except for Antarctica. It looks like you're not just in the United States, you're everywhere, right?

Patrick Quade: We've had reports from 170 countries. We detect outbreaks around the world, not just here in the U.

S. And we operate natively in seven languages. So if you're in France or Germany, you can view the data, the site in

Matt Regusci: your language. And Spanish too, because you've got people in Mexico I'm seeing and yeah. Yeah.

Francine Shaw: We have listeners there.

Patrick Quade: In Brazil? Portuguese? Portuguese, yeah. I think, yeah, Portuguese, simple Chinese, Spanish.

We have some people in New Zealand. What language is that? Is that? As an Australian, I'm not going to talk about that. Anyway, I love Kiwis. That's actually fake news, though. I think it's fake news that Australians and Kiwis don't get along. Some of my best friends are Kiwis, so. English. English for the Kiwis.

English. Okay. Yeah. All right. With some special accents on some of the vowels,

Matt Regusci: yeah.

Francine Shaw: We have friends with that accent.

Matt Regusci: Gosh, yeah, I'm looking at it and you just have hits like every continent from so many countries. Yeah, that's just the recent 30 days,

Patrick Quade: I think, while we're looking at

Matt Regusci: that. Love it. And so do you ever have people come in who think they're actually poisoned, like for a CDC type of thing instead of food safety?

Patrick Quade: So, we have had well water. We welcome everyone. If you got sick, we welcome you to make a report. So, we detected a outbreak at a well water at a hiking zip line park in, I think it was in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So, over 500 people sick and so we started getting reports citing this hiking park and we're like, what is this?

And we let the county know and they investigated and it turned out to be from the, People were citing the well water, but we actually, we weren't sure how plausible that was. And it turns out it's pretty plausible. But yeah, so we've had, yeah, with toxins, chemicals, one of the criticism we get is people say, Oh my God, I just ate and I got sick.

And we'll sometimes get comments like, Oh, that's not food poisoning. Food poisoning takes whatever they think is the right number of hours based on their knowledge. And we say chemical contamination, symptoms can start immediately. Physical contamination, same thing. So, and we welcome all of that. And we have all

Matt Regusci: of that.

Remember that podcast we did on that lady who killed her ex husband's family off with Beef Wellington? That would be a good one to report. Yeah, with the mushrooms, yeah. Mushrooms, yes. Poison

Francine Shaw: mushrooms. In England. They were in

Matt Regusci: England. I can't remember that now you mention it. I don't think Oh no, it was Australia.

Was it? Yeah, it was some little town Leave us alone, man. No, I'm serious. It was like some little town next to Queensland or something like that, not Australia.

Patrick Quade: Okay, I'll have to look that one up. We do have people report that I think my spouse was poisoning me, stuff like that. Yeah, if it's criminal oriented, we refer them to the, like, the police or try and help them somehow, but it's not, yeah, it's, we're actually, we're not too sure how to handle, they're infrequent, so I, I, It's not common, but we get them.

Yeah

Matt Regusci: Yeah, you're like, my gosh, you think your spouse is poisoning you and you went on my website to report this? That's a lot harder than 9 1 1. Yeah,

Francine Shaw: again, I was Poisoned. com. Yeah,

Patrick Quade: it's descriptive. Yeah.

Francine Shaw: Yeah, so And maybe you don't wanna answer this, you say you have it broken down into brands and like what brands have the most cases. Are you comfortable telling us or do you not? If you wanna stay away from, that's fine. He sells that data.

Patrick Quade: Oh, . Well, we, we, we've made that's a, that's, that's a decent amount of work to do that.

So that's stuff that's not click of the fingers type sauce. So we, if, and we also, we have a lot of data that we need to capture, like how many stores, it

Francine Shaw: was a curiosity question.

Patrick Quade: So yeah, no, no problem. No, I can give an example of a brand that currently we just, I don't, we, we get reported, we've had reports had over time.

That one, Listeria is trickier because it's such a long onset. So the chances of pummel people will remember. So I'd go so far as to say that unless it was a doctor diagnosis with I was diagnosed with Listeria and people will upload their diagnosis. That we get that as well. I think the likelihood someone would correctly do attribution on that is lower because it's such a long onset.

Yeah,

Matt Regusci: they'll list out three meals over the course of six weeks.

Francine Shaw: I was being facetious. Yes, you are. I'm going to get a cease and desist. I see it.

Patrick Quade: But yeah, one of the ones, uh, we just made a, an example. Did an example for people to help explain what it is that we do and it's actually it's on our LinkedIn.

So Sweetgreen is known as a healthy choice. So right now it's running around 11x higher than, so over 10 times higher than our benchmark. What is

Francine Shaw: it?

Patrick Quade: Sweetgreens is a restaurant chain in California and stuff. There's around 300 N 300 or so nationally. I've never heard.

Francine Shaw: I've never heard of it.

Patrick Quade: Yeah. It's in most big centers, most big cities.

But it's not, it's like I said, only around 300, three or 400 of them. So, but that's just an example. But you could see that on our go to our. DineSafe is the name of the B2B company that we have that does this work and generates this type of analytics. So on our DineSafe LinkedIn, we have a post about giving some examples of current brands that like are outliers that people can, can think about.

And again, we're not, they're dealing with a very tricky, it's freshly made salads, chopped. Remain and all fresh ingredients chopped in front of you. That's, so it's, they have a riskier product than say a pizza company that's baking everything just 600 degrees or whatever it is. So, but I think the duty of care doesn't, doesn't go away because what you're doing is more difficult.

Francine Shaw: It doesn't negate the responsibilities of making sure it's a safe product.

Patrick Quade: Yeah. So is that, is that kind of what you're asking? Yeah.

Francine Shaw: Yeah.

Matt Regusci: 100. Yes. Very cool. Okay, so what would you for both our consumer side of our audience and our food safety nerds What would be a takeaway that you would want them to know about?

You do it. I was poisoned.

Patrick Quade: So if you get sick or if you can, if you're a person, a regular listener, you get sick, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love you to, to file a report. It can make a difference. It really absolutely can make a difference. If you are a loved one or a friend, it's a report. Also sign up for our free emails.

We'll send you a weekly report of everything that's going on just in your neighborhood. So that's a free service. So you can go right to the website at the top and get a lot to my city, put your email and your. Area that you live in and we, we GFN certainly pop that to you. You can get daily or weekly or a monthly recap of what's happening.

We also send you recalls and outbreak like official recalls and official outbreaks. And we think we do a great job at that. It saves you the signing up for the USDA recalls, the FDA recalls. There's some local recalls. There's company recalls, we assimilate all that. So we think as a consumer, that's a great way to stay.

In touch just with a, a weekly email of what's going on, what you want to do

Matt Regusci: right now. It literally took

Patrick Quade: two seconds. Oh, awesome. Yeah. We're delighted to have you, Matt. For public health, if you're environmental health agency, epidemiology, we'd love to have you on the platform. It's a free, there's a free tier for every public health agency and that's globally.

And, but those are lots of global as well that I just mentioned. So that's anyone in any country that's listening and for industry, do you want to know if your 20 times higher than your peers. We think you should want to know that because the end result of that can be economically devastating. It's existential.

So we think keeping an eye on that is, is such a no brainer that we encourage you to reach out to us. We're not here to harm anyone. This was born out of a personal experience and it became bigger organically. And when we're here for better outcomes and we're not the enemy of any one. And if we can help brands.

Keep an eye on things, have better surveillance, enhance their own surveillance, and identify potential issues ahead of time, then we'd love to have you on the platform.

Francine Shaw: Again, I see it as part of being preventative rather than reactive, so yeah, I agree with you.

Matt Regusci: Because it would be ultimately you're reacting to what things are happening, but you're preventing for long term because you're seeing what's happening in real time.

And then now you can actually make decisions operationally and organizationally on a larger scale to make sure it doesn't happen. And watch the numbers come down. And watch the numbers come down. Ah, fascinating. Yeah. How many, do you have a whole lot of companies that are doing that? Not enough.

Patrick Quade: We have some, we have some really awesome partners.

Some of them don't, we have NDAs. They don't want to, they don't want to talk, but, but Cheesecake Factory is awesome. Dr. Al, we love Dr. Al and he's been a mentor and they've been a great partner and just tech forward, bringing new technology, new ideas, and they do a fantastic job, but they also want to keep an eye on things.

So Red Robin. Emily's awesome. And, and the whole Red Robin risk management team. Red Robin. Yum. Cheesecake

Francine Shaw: Factory is very forward thinking.

Patrick Quade: Yeah.

Francine Shaw: Very forward thinking. Dr. Al, I believe you said. Very forward thinking.

Patrick Quade: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So that's a couple of names just that I can talk about. Yeah. That's awesome.

We'd love to have more. But some brands I think would prefer we didn't exist, of course, but we're working to change that. Club people know that we're here to help and try and change people's minds and have more have more industry participants

Matt Regusci: Yeah, cuz the data is there and just like you said they're gonna post this on X.

They're gonna post it on LinkedIn They're gonna post it on Facebook or Instagram or something like that and they're just gonna name things off So if this I could see how this would be a lot more constructive use of that Information and data. Uh, so cool. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you. This was such a great interview. Hopefully our listeners will take the information that was from here and use it and sign up because I just did, and it literally took Seconds were interviewing you and I signed up for this thing and yeah, anything else before we tell him give him some good advice.

Francine Shaw: I would say don't eat poop. So you don't end up on. I don't end up on. I was poison. com. That's what I would say.

Matt Regusci: Very good. Magic. Don't eat poop. And don't drink poop too. Cause you could end up on this as well. Some well. That's fascinating that 400, 500 people list that. Well, that's, that is, they pinpointed it.

They knew exactly what it was and it was so cool. I'm really kicking out on this. It's so cool. Thank you so much again. And don't eat poop. Thanks

Patrick Quade: so much. Bye

bye.