How Safe Is The Food In Columbus Stadiums?

Mold in ice machines at six stands at Miller Park in Milwaukee. A cockroach crawling over a soda dispenser in a private club at Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh. Food service workers repeatedly ignoring orders to wash their hands at a stand at Detroit’s Ford Field.

Columbus Nationwide Arena made the list with approximately 9% of its vendors out of compliance. From the ESPN vendor interactive map that posted these violations, One of the stadium’s critical violations was for employees’ handling lemons, limes and oranges with their bare hands while placing them on beverage glasses.

From the same vendor report, inspectors at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, the home of the Cincinnati Reds,  saw an employee scraping food debris from a spatula using the trash bin and then trying to continue using the same spatula without cleaning it. The ballpark came in with a 40% vendor violation rate.

Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals, Quicken Loan Arena, home of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Progressive Field, Home of the Cleveland Indians, and Cleveland Browns Stadium all had some sort of violations.

The city of Chicago had the biggest concentration of stadiums with no violations including Wrigley Field, The United Center and U.S. Cellular Field.

Sports fans don’t always see such health threats when ordering a $5 hot dog and $6 beer at a professional sports stadium or arena. But the violations catch the eyes of inspectors who poke, prod and probe stadium kitchens that dish out a range of foods from burgers to sushi, for tens of millions of fans who eat at major professional sports venues from coast to coast each year. While there hasn’t been a documented mass outbreak of foodborne illness at a professional sports stadium, fans, players and coaches have said they have fallen ill from food, including Red Sox manager Terry Francona, who blamed bad sushi in the clubhouse for a bout of food poisoning he had before a series playoff game in Anaheim last fall.

Waldrop and other food safety experts said that many cases of food poisoning go unreported. Even when fans do complain, food poisoning — which can hit within hours of eating contaminated food or take days to appear — is hard to prove. Read More