Closing the Blind Spot: How AI Turns Fragmented Health Inspections into Real-Time Action for Brands

In this episode of Beyond Data Management, Cameron Garrison shares his presentation from the AFDO AI in Food Safety Workshop in Columbus, OH titled: “Closing the Blind Spot.”

For years, restaurant chains and food brands have struggled to get timely, consistent access to local health inspection results. With more than 3,000 environmental health agencies using different forms, scoring systems, and food codes, the data remains fragmented. Too often, corporate food safety and QA teams first learn about serious violations through media headlines instead of their own systems.

Cameron walks through why earlier attempts (ETL feeds, public records requests, keyword matching) never scaled—and why AI changes the equation now. Semantic models can map disparate inspection findings back to a consistent standard (such as the FDA Food Code), apply brand-specific weighting, and deliver a unified national command center that sits alongside internal QA audits.

The result: faster corrective action, stronger food safety culture, and a true partnership between regulators and industry on the shared mission of protecting the public.

Whether you work in environmental health, state agriculture, or corporate food safety, this is a practical look at turning public inspection data into something both sides can actually use.
Contact Cameron 
Cameron@hscloudsuite.com 
if you’d like to discuss the approach or get involved.

Special thanks to AFDO for hosting an outstanding AI in Food Safety Workshop.
#FoodSafety #AIinFoodSafety #HealthInspections #RegulatoryTech #EnvironmentalHealth #AFDO #FoodCode #QA #BeyondDataManagement

Please remember to like and subscribe - and reach out to us with your stories and show ideas Beyond@hscloudsuite.com 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

This is the Beyond Data Management Podcast powered by HS GovTech. Now here's your host, Cameron Garrison.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Welcome to a special presentation of the Beyond Data Management Podcast Channel. I'm Cameron Garrison. We were recently at AFTO, the Association of Food and Drug Officials conference, and they had a really neat event on the Friday of the conference beginning, and it was the AI in Food Safety workshop. There was a lot of panelists from around the country, industry, and regulatory that joined to provide presentations on challenges that they're solving in food safety with AI technology. And there was also a panel where you all got to ask questions in the audience and we discussed difficult use cases for AI. I was really honored to be asked to be one of the speakers and panelists on that. And so what we're going to play for you here is the topic that I chose to present on using technology and AI for food safety. It's called closing the blind spot. It's a new way to, with AI, bring the inspections that are done every day by the dedicated public servants and health departments and agriculture departments around the country, making that available easily and readily to industry partners and particularly their QA and food safety teams who are also on the same mission that the regulators are, which is good quality and food safety. Inspections are really important. Some people say they're just a snapshot, and that may be true, but they're important, and that data should be available to be actioned on by big brands and chains that are being regulated. So here from the AFTO AI in food safety workshop, my presentation on closing the blind spot between regulators and industry. HealthSpace is currently, I just did it. Currently it's uh just over a thousand fifty, as the main source of truth collecting all of their data, everything from complaints, inspections, permitting, billing, all of those types of things. And this was hard for me. I've had up until about a week and a half ago, I had three separate case studies working. And one of them actually is one of the workshop topics. How do you get use inspection data to do better usage of your resources with limited inspectors? You never have as many as you need. We've been doing that with the state of Colorado since 2020. So then the other one that I really love that I've been involved in analyzing deeply lately is foodborne illness complaint intake and AI agents there. But I decided at the end to settle on this one because it's actually one that me and a lot of people, even people in Jorge's position, have been sort of chasing for years. And that is the public regulatory data and the difficulty creating a blind spot for industry to get it timely and to be able to utilize it. And this has been, again, a long time going. Back in 2005, I so I first company in the space uh DHD. And in 2005, we worked with them at DHD, and I worked with uh Darden and Yum brands and some of the larger ones. DHD at the time had about 720 agencies, and the agencies were very willing to say, yes, you can share the public record aspect under these conditions. But it still didn't turn out to really accomplish what needed to be done because we were using ETLs. I will try not to go into nerd speak here, uh, but we were using processes that ended up just being expensive, manual, and then the chains or the brands would have to have a lot of people to actually normalize that data. So, this is what we'll talk about here today, is closing that blind spot. A lot of times there's a mock headline there, health inspectors cite serious violations at popular chains. A lot of times, unfortunately, the first time corporate or industry will know at times of a really bad violation, or even if it's not that bad, uh a tantalizing one is the media. You get called for comment, or you'll just see it on the news. This has been an interesting evolution. So the case study problem for this is how can a restaurant chain, and not just chains all of them, but chains that's more acute, receive local health inspection results in real time, interpreting them consistently, even though there's different sheets, different scoring methods, different food codes being implemented. You have quite an issue with that there. So that's sort of the problem in a nutshell. And it's really two sides of the same mission. So environmental health departments, there's 3,000 and change. And then you've got federal regulators, you've got state departments of agriculture, we work with a lot of them, all of them generating data. At a top level, they're generating the exact same data. But they're not, if you need to analyze it consistently. Uh, millions are spent by chains in pursuit of this data and on other quality assurance programs. They spend a lot on internal quality assurance audits. But there's really one goal at the end of the day. These are not adversarial relationships, these are two partners on they have different roles, but are serving on the same mission, which is you don't want your customers to get sick. And that's what the health department does as well. So the scale of the problem is pretty, pretty big. So it's it's hard to actually do a graphic that to represent just how messy it is. But you've got 3,000 or so data silos or databases that are controlled and configured and customized by all the local health agencies. And if you're a chain, it's a map of data points, but no one way to grab them and to be able to interact with them. And and uh the current state's also so fragmented. So you've got you know almost 1,100 of them on one platform like HS Cloud Suite, but then that still leaves you know a couple thousand more, a little bit less, uh, that have a variety of things. In-house, believe it or not, there's still a lot of agencies using paper. Uh there really is. And and of course, that's an even bigger problem because no matter you can't even ingest that data if it's on paper. Some people have websites, so almost universally. So this is public record data, uh, generally speaking, in every state. And the states and local departments have put a huge push over the last 20 years to put that data online for the public, which is great for the consuming public. And it's good for the chains, except they have a scale problem. If you've got how many facilities did you say you had, Jorge? I should remember that. See, 7,000 stores. That's a lot of inspections rolling in. You cannot staff up to read and make analysis of them by by humans. It's just not possible. And I'll skip a couple there for time. The heterogeneity challenge is really what this is. Uh, and I used the handwritten form as an example there. You have everything from handwritten to more standardized. Uh, we do have 14 states that have standardized on HS Cloud Suite, meaning at least in those 14 states, all of the local jurisdictions have a shared data model. So there is progress being made, but if we wait for that to happen, all 50 states agree and come to one standard. We're all going to be old, gray, dead, and gone by the time that there's something actionable out of that. What chains need is a dashboard to their brand standards, which are probably going to be tied to the FDA probably 2022 food code, and at least in many ways, so that they can view 7,000 inspections from 7,000 locations from different agencies in one format and be able to do weighting and things. Um, the AI-powered solution is really the only way to do it. So when I worked with Darden 21 years ago and Young Brands and some others, but those were the largest, it was really just a down payment on what could be, but the tech just wasn't there. Well, it's here now. And there's actually some people that are working on the that problem from an AI perspective. And now that you've got a huge amount of the country's data consolidating to at least one standard platform that can be shared more easily, uh, the pieces are here and the time is now. So old, old, old school, we would use you can ingest that data electronically through a REST API into a dashboard for your chain or your company. And all of that regulatory data, it also would allow you then to lay in the internal QA audits and standards that you do, and to be able to have one ecosystem where you can deal with all of that. I I'm not even gonna spend much time here because I think it's kind of obvious, and I don't even believe my own number on the slide there. I think nine days is generous. Um, to have to do of every inspection at every one of your locations within nine days. I I actually think that's a really optimistic uh uh analysis of that. So it really would be a game changer, though, thinking of partners from public side and the industry side, the ability with AI to bring all of this together, and I will get you a national unified command center if you're on the brand side. So you can set your what you what's important to your brand. What are the things that if the department marks it, we always want to action it immediately in the following workflow? And having that for a thousand and ultimately more agencies will be able to work without human involvement. This hard slide's a little hard to see, but to give you an idea from a brand perspective, you can on the left-hand side there, where there are the different, those are actually like a brand standard tied to FDA food code, which is going to reflect back to what inspectors are marking in the field at the regulatory level. And you can actually review for each category, thinking again, FDA 22, if you standardize to that, that every one of your locations or regions, the locations are there, and then you can literally have them scored however you want. The scoring is something that is a big problem because some agencies, well, North Carolina, where I'm from, they do uh 100. Uh they count down from 100. And so if you get a 70, what's funny about that is a lot of consumers actually, uh without some education back in the day, thought a B was okay. And the logic would be well, if I got a B in school, I didn't get grounded, I didn't have privileges taken, and I I turned out okay. Um so and then some agencies do demerits from zero up. You can't handle that if you're a chain. You need to be able to develop your own weighting. If and it's always fun to pick on the roaches and mice because that's what the media does. So if we have roaches in our facility, what do we want to weight that as a corporation according to our standards internally? And so you can take all the agency data in and put your own consistent weighting on it, which does make it a lot easier to actually action on. And, you know, it's instant national visibility for the chains, which they don't have well. I did found, I think I failed to mention the top. I worked with EcoLab. So I've been chasing this for a long time. I worked with EcoLab in 07 and 08 to found their HDI, Health Department Intelligence arm out of EcoShore. But we ran into the same problems. The data couldn't be normalized efficiently or cheaply, and you couldn't just put it on autopilot and have it show up. But that's that's here now. So chains will get visibility they've ever had. You'll it ties into a food safety culture. You hear that a lot. We've all been to those seminars and workshops, but there is, it's real, and this really helps reinforce that. And more importantly, faster corrective action. And that's where agencies are in league with industry. If they'll start actioning on certain critical items you find because they know about them quickly, that's a win for the regulatory side. And of course, for the public, I think the the uh information is uh or the benefits are quite uh self-evident. So, sort of in closing, and just in one slide to sort of wrap up what we said, like why up until, even though I kept chasing that whale, we couldn't quite get it where it needed to be, is because ETLs and dumping data to an FTP and then parsing it in, it just doesn't scale. But AI, and one of the big things is we struggled this before in the first iteration of this years ago, is if you're doing it based on keyword, it just leaves a lot of gaps. But when you have models that understand semantic meaning, they know, okay, it's 16B on this county's checklist, but it's really this under the FDA food code, and we're going to reflect it that way for consistency for the chain. Uh, and you don't have to go through hand, uh, you know, unstructured data, PDFs, copies of things, and you don't have to do public information requests to get the data. Uh, so it really gives them a pipeline. Uh, we I know there'll probably be some questions on this. Health departments do have to maintain control of what they're sharing and who it's being shared with. That is a given. We can't just fling your data out there and into the blind. And so it would have to be approved by an agency to join that network and do it. And only the change should have visibility to it. Anything that you want to communicate to the public should come through your website. And most agencies are already doing that, and I don't think you want to water that down because that then distracts from the brand and being out front as your agency. Uh, you don't want to have that really kind of be behind a third party. And of course, it's auditable and you can do phase rollout. Uh, so there's going to be a lot of fun there. I know I'm long, and before we go to questions, I took a note on that podcast tool because that's that's really cool. Um, I was just plugged to a degree. It's a passion project started about a year ago, and uh HSGov Tech was very kind in uh in jumping behind it and helping make it. But this is a uh podcast for the regulatory community, particularly EH. It's pretty heavy on food safety. You'll recognize Steve and his bow tie there. Uh he did a uh quite a good rundown of a bunch of things that were going on and a preview of the conference for that audience. But commend it to you if you'd like. There's been some great guests. In fact, this guy right here has been on before. We had a long conversation. So, really, it's just sort of a water cooler where you can come uh learn about different things other people are doing around the nation and uh and and build a little bit more community, which has always been hard with this. Thank you all. I hope you enjoyed that presentation. There's a lot of work that has been done, a lot of work still to do to make this ultimate dream a reality. But if you'd like to know more, I've got my contact information down in the description below. Please feel free to reach out to me if you've got any ideas, suggestions, or would like to be involved in some way. I'd love to talk with you and appreciate you watching. Special thanks also to AFTO again for putting on a really great event. There's a lot uh of great learning there for myself included, and I want to thank them for doing that and for inviting me. We look forward to doing some follow-ups on it with AFTO again in the future. Until next time, have a great day, everybody. Quick break here to introduce Wiley from our friends at AFTO. Need answers fast? Wiley helps you find guidance, training, contact information, subject matter experts, and AFTO resources in seconds powered by AI. It can also help draft checklists, SOPs, training plans, action plans, webinar summaries, and even approval of emails for your supervisor. Whether you're in the office, in the field, or preparing for your next training, Wiley is there to help you spend less time researching and more time getting things done. Learn more at afto.org Ask Wiley. It's a brave new world of AI, and Afto's leading the way with Wiley. Afto.org askwily or scan the QR code on the screen.