When a hot coffee burn occurs in a restaurant drive thru, simply determining what happened is not enough. It’s obvious that a customer was burned, but that does not provide an answer as to the reasons why.
A proper investigation should go further and determine why it happened and what allowed the failure to exist in the first place.
Whether the burn occurred during a drive-thru coffee handoff, at a restaurant counter, or during another hot beverage service, an important question should be asked:
Did an operational or risk management failure exist, if so, why did it exist, and why was it not identified and corrected before someone was injured?
A thorough restaurant incident investigation should examine more than the immediate circumstances of the coffee spill or burn. It should evaluate the restaurant’s procedures, employee training, beverage handling practices, equipment, management oversight, and other operational conditions that may have contributed to the incident.
The purpose of an incident report and root cause investigation is not simply to document that someone was burned by hot coffee. It is to determine how the incident occurred, why it occurred, and what corrective actions are necessary to help prevent it from happening again.
And it has to do with more than the temperature of the coffee – even though restaurant operators should know what that temperature is.
Do you have a hot coffee or hot tea burn case? There are many industry standards that could be critical to your case – and the highly sought after expertise of Restaurant Expert Witness could be the factor that secures a victory in your case.
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