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Hi, yes we have an API service. We have had interest in an app, and do plan to release one, we are beta testing right now for IOS and Android.

Thanks! I will do that. I appreciate it.

We roll data off the site after 30 days, so you are only looking at recent history, and also not every report goes live on the site. I think the largest we had reported in this period are maybe a couple of cases citing between 20 and 40 people sick.

Thanks for the sentiment re Dinesafe. Iwaspoisoned.com is not for everyone, but it does fare well on search and being memorable.

Agreed, I expect we would use it to supplement but not supplant human reviews.

There are three main types of contaminants that can occur: physical, chemical, and biological. Epidemiologists tend to focus on the last one. We are not biased toward any of them, we welcome reports from anything that can harm consumers. With chemical contamination the onset can be within minutes, and even with the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (commonly just called Staph) onset can be as soon as 1 hour.

Further, in the spirit of our partnership with public health - attribution - while beneficial - is not the only benefit from our site. Simply knowing that you have a cluster of people in your county exhibiting norovirus like symptoms is important, especially when you have their contact information.

It gives public health the opportunity to follow up and conduct surveys including a food history, to try and determine attribution, but it also allows education, and prevention. Many people don't realize that if you have norovirus, you can be contagious for up to three days after recovery. So if you are a food worker, or work in a hospital, or daycare this point is critical to communicate to prevent further spreading, especially given how virulent norovirus is.

Besides all that - we have detected outbreaks of cases with longer incubation periods such as E. coli, so while some amount of misattribution is real it doesn't preclude us from achieving positive outcomes.

Thanks

Good! glad to hear it :)

Thanks for the tip re the real esate perspective, I had not thought of it that way. The publicly listed companies definitely have a larger group of participants who care about the outcomes, in their investors. -----------------------------------------------------------------

question - whats your plan for marketing to end user?

Earned media has been helpful to us here, search, and social media have also been helpful. Google search "food poisoning kfc" (or any brand) and you can see we do reasonably well at that. With more resources we can do a lot better at all of these, and there is a virtuous cycle for us of identifying more outbreaks = more press = more awareness = more reports = identifying more outbreaks.

We are also pretty close to roll out languages - we have active users and reports in most countries, and public health as well, but improving languages will help that.

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question - How do you plan on using social media instagram / twitter / facebook / email / etc to end user?

There is a ton of work to do here, and a lot of upside for us when we get to it. In terms of the best strategy - this is a work in progress, and as we pull more brainpower in to help us with that we have a high degree of confidence we will get it right.

question - You said you will be using SMS to alert end user, but have you tailored a strategy laying out all edge case scenarios?

We have not ironed out all the edge cases as yet. Our email subscription is the most popular, there is demand for our app as well, but that is down the road. There are some interesting opportunities with SMS and messaging, they need more work.

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question - if I search "X restaurant name" would I see a domain name link to dinesafe.com/restaurant_name?

I have a question regarding this. Obviously corporations are going to have a big social media presence, but smaller restaurants (should you most likely be targeting this avenue) have a weaker social media / google presence.

I can see if your service were to really take off, it might inadventely affect businesses negatively. For instance I might search "XYZ restaurant name" and out comes a list on the 7th or 10th listing about a food safety illness report on google.

>> Yes this does happen, there are some cases where we do rank higher than the companies own website. Not our intent, we are thinking through this.

question - I know you mentioned earlier you have no intention for businesses to tamper with data entered from their clients. But, what about giving them a 2nd chance? Unlisting the report directly on google, but leaving the report intact on the site. Have you considered recourse on this angle as well?

>> We offer the restaurant the opportunity to secure message with the complainant (anonymized complainant information). Fast, and positive response to customers can often result in review retractions, and even stronger brand loyalty. If a customer wants to take a review down we do it. We encourage this route. Given we roll data off our site after 30 days we feel like we are doing a lot already, but we are open to refine our solutions on this point.

Yes. Dinesafe.org sells data and data intelligence from iwaspoisoned.com

Iwaspoisoned.com is the site i think you meant to look at. It shows the reports etc, this is the consumer facing site.

Once we receive and moderate your report. It will go to public health. There are many paths it can take from there. We don't require lab tests, that is just a potential scenario, most common where there is either an important (deadly) pathogen potentially involved, or if it appears to be potentially a larger outbreak, and it is a pathogen that can't be detected in the facility. It's not necessarily ever a requirement. What we offer to consumers is that if you speak up there is potential that your report can make a difference.

1. What incentivizes people to report ? Social responsibility/concerns for others is the most common reason given when we survey people. For many people a proper case of food poisoning is frightening and extremely motivating.

2. On trust - crowdsourcing is imperfect. We have a track record of detecting outbreaks. Trust is case by case, for instance if you as a consumer choose to distrust our users, you are welcome to. What we tell restaurants is that our data is imperfect but we strongly recommend against ignoring it.

2. On scraping - For food poisoning reports we do not scrape public inspection reports. We do pull in external data for related (but not food poisoning) information such as temporary restaurant closures due to food safety infractions (vermin etc), or critical violations and fail grades. We also allow consumers to report high risk food safety observations, (raw chicken burgers etc). However these are just additional data points that our subscribers and consumers want to see, they are not part of what we use for detection. Though they can be correlated. No intention to blur the lines. It is actually on our to do list to come up with an elegant way of allowing consumers to separate if they want, and we definitely want a checkbox on our map, and also in our app. We also have in our queue a way for consumers to customize their email alerts to choose which data they get.

Thanks

ps. Not tested on us. We have never been approached once by a large organization, or their law firm

From us the data to goes to the governing public health agency. Each spammer would need to individually re-present their case to that agency including a 72 hour food history, and potentially bio testing. The next steps can include epidemiolist, site visit, lab testing and more. The likelihood that everything could be falsified including lab tests with all these government officials is low, and it is only when a case passes through this process that a health agency will consider making an announcement such as "Restaurant X is the source of X pathogen causing X people to be sick"

We collect more than free form text.

Thanks

Thanks. Yes is is true, many state and city health agencies are under difficutl budget constraints, in some cases having as few as a third of the people needed to meet inspection targets

Ha. ex-finance guy, nothing to do with law. Thanks for the well wishes. As fyi - I have been approached by law firms for lead generation, but I think only twice ever. As I understand it, succesfully litigating a foodborne illness case can be relatively difficult.

6. We roll data off our site after 30 days, to combat harming restaurants where the circumstances may have changed. We think this is one reason restaurants should actually prefer people report on our site vs twitter, or yelp, or facebook. Our site is not intended as a permanent public record.

7. Yes we have had interest from theme parks, music festivals, caterers, airlines, gas stations, big retail that also sells food. We would go all the way down to food trucks, we get data for all of these, and welcome everyone taking advantage of it.

8. What big data analytics did your model use to "predict" chipotle's outbreak? The relative volume of data we received from Chipotle consumers was staggering - and this was prior to their first outbreak when they were still considered 'high quality' we did not need quants or data scientists for this one.

7. I speak at a bunch of events, but not yet at the National Restaurant Association, they are still fighting transparency on restaurant ratings! It will take them a second to warm up to us. We have started and had some great conversations with them, but it may take a little longer for them to get involved. When I have spoken at restaruant associations or other more broad events (like the Food Safety Summit, or International Association for Food Protection, which has a lot of industry participants) there are two camps. The tech forward companies who embrace data, even where it's imperfect, and are really interested. The remainder is a mixture, when I hear from the critics among these I typically point out 1) people are already reporting on social media 2) What I'm doing was bound to happen 3) Given how responsibly we are running this service, they ought to be glad it is me who is running it. They usually get these points.

Agreed, this is why we do not pronounce a single report as a truth.

We do not present confidence indicators. We do explain the details of foodborne illness on our site, but we do want to do better on this, we will continue to refine messaging to ensure our subscribers, or other people who find us, understand the strengths, and considerations in looking at our data.

1. Yes we intend to offer intermediate levels of service, eventually moving all the way down to a self serve option for a single restaurant.

2. We are still working on pricing for the smaller participants. The offering will likely be slightly different, but this scales very well, so we still think they can get access to quite a few of the features, just needs to be low /zero touch on our end, and the pricing needs to be right for them to ge involved.

3. We have geo-fenced notifications for users, we eventually will allow users to set a custom radius, and frequency and sensitivity, all pretty easy stuff to do, just need to get to it.

4. We are open to partnerships and have been approached about this. Yelp's business model is somewhat predicated upon 'Eating out is great' so hosting disparaging information may be less interesting to them. I think as our service continues to become more normalized and understood and expected, there will be a lot more great opportunities for partnerships

5. While I am sitting in this seat, we will not allow companies to buy away reports. Trust is everything, and I think consumers can figure this out really fast, and once you lose trust, you don't have much, especially with what we are doing, there is much more at stake than a normal review site. I thnk the companies don't want this either. As what we are doing continues to become more normalized, if our service started to become corrupted, then consumers lose trust, and another medium will pop up, and it may be a more adversarial organization. So in the end I think the large brands understand that, and should want us to continue to be the leading platform in this space.

TBC

Exactly. This is one topic where everyone is on the same page, people don't want to get sick, restaurants don't want to make them sick. We are helping restaurants to do better on their most important core objective.

Sorry to hear it, yes there is a lot that can go wrong. Thanks for the support : )

Agreed. The text of the report is only a small part of it. We are looking at a range of other things on the back end. Also a scenario like that is a red flag to us, and it triggers further due diligence. It'will also trigger public health, who will then require people to pick up the phone, it will require a 72 hour food history so on, physical site investigation. It does not work like 50 reports come in, and an outbreak is immediately declared - far from it. That is just the start of further work. Not to say someday the system won't be gamed, but we are doing a lot of hard work to ensure it does not happen.

We have not and will not accuse anyone of anything. From a legal perspective, nothing new to see here, people have been posting reports of food poisoning on social media for years, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook so on. We are just enabling it in a way that more easily facilitates positive outcomes.

As for a truly negative outcome e.g. a pronouncement by a public health agency that Restaurant X caused a foodborne illness outbreak. This is not possible with a handful of people, as it requires microbiologists, epidemiologists, environmental health experts so on. Unless that handful of people can credibly fool the science, and all these expert participants.

We do have a great law firm, and we are advised as long as we remain a platform for people to report there is zero risk, and this has been tested many times by companies with deep pockets.

Thanks!

Scale > Great question. We think we can do it. We have a great offshore team with affordable scaling, also we just implemented our first machine learning module, and plan to build on this to help speed up and improve accuracy.

False flags on detecting outbreaks > No we have not. Mainly becasue we don't make pronouncements such as "Restaurant X made people sick and they have a problem". Mainly because foodborne illness can be complicated. It may have been a supplier problem, it may be something related to that restaurant but not that restaurants fault. What our site does make clear is that 120 people reported sick after eating at Restaurant X, and at that point both the restaurant and public health ought to examine the situation immediately. It's up to public health agencies, the epidemiologists etc. to make the official judgement.

False flags on predicting food safety issues (potential precursor to outbreaks) > So far our goal is to partner with companies that exhibit high risk and the health agencies that monitor them. So we have not made any public predictions on that, except I think once on Chipotle, which was correct, but I'm not certain we would do that often. This will probably evolve, and it's something we need to be careful on.

We are not attacking them, nor are the public health agencies, so hopefully they do not feel the need to defend. Also given we roll reports off the site after 30 days we believe there is less of a concern from that perspective. We are not a permanent record like Yelp or other platforms. Naturally they do have to pay if they want to get any of the features and services we offer to help strengthen their food safety program, but we are presenting ourselves as a partner not an advesary.

Also very few goverment agencies release complaint data, and for those few that do, it is not done in a timely actionable accessible way.

We do a pretty deep dive on every report in the moderating process. Someone with malicious intent could get one report past us. Getting multiple reports past us would be do-able but harder. Getting them actioned by public health would be close to impossible. Rolling reports off after 30 days hopefully de-motivates trolls, if their hard work is gone so fast.

Great point about the hover, and information popups for mobile, thanks for the reminder. We had those in the past, they were not well used, but I still think it's great to have them, especially for the 'Send Report To' - that's a newer feature. Star ratings is something new we are trying out, some people want to rate, and as wonderfully suprising as some people are, some want to rate well. I think its' an offset to them 'feeling bad' about reporting a place, especially if it's a place they frequent, and usually like. Not sure.

Depends on what you mean by weed out. Each report is a signal. A single report on our site is a weak signal but still may result in a) an inspection and identification of critical violations b) discovery of an outbreak c) a false positive. One hundred reports relating to the same place same timeframe, would be considered a strong signal, and more typically results in a) and b). Our approach to handling the false positive aspect is that we roll data off our website after 30 days.

Yes, Their consumer facing platform does not have the URL , but we do share the name. I have since met the guy who built and runs that program, we are all ok with it, since our Dinesafe is strictly a B2B platform. We actually partner with them, and send them data.