IWASPOISONED.COM

SAFER DINING BY CROWDSOURCING

Iwaspoisoned.com is an independent, curated crowd-sourcing site designed to monitor food safety incidents in real-time. Our mission is threefold;

1. Provide an outlet for consumers to share their experiences
2. Assist health departments in identifying potential outbreaks
3. Help companies protect their customers and brand reputation.

DID YOU KNOW…?

In 2015, Americans spent more money on dining out than on groceries. In fact, 1 in 4 eat fast food daily and almost 60% eat out at a non-fast food restaurant at least once a week. Many of these people will get food poisoning....

HOW IWASPOISONED.COM WORKS

REPORT:  If a consumer gets sick from eating out Iwaspoisoned.com provides a fast and simple way for consumers to share their experience and raise the alert of a potential problem.

SEARCH: for reports from other consumers: • By city or state • By restaurant or product name • By restaurant name in a specific area.

SIGN-UP: for email alerts for a specific state or region. Choose to have these delivered daily, weekly or as reported.

WHY IWASPOISONED.COM

Foodborne Illness BY THE NUMBERS:

• United States:
  • 50 million sickened annually
  • 3,000 deaths
• Worldwide:
  • 600 million sickened annually
  • 420,000 deaths
• Approximately 30+% of deaths are children
• 49% of local health departments nationwide have reduced or eliminated programs
• 36% of staff lost at local health departments nationwide
• More than $15.6 billion estimated annual impact to the U.S. economy
• Chipotle lost $10.7 billion in market capital during the 2015 outbreak crisis
• Former Peanut Corporation of America CEO currently serving 28 year prison term for knowingly distributing products that killed nine and made thousands ill

WHO IWASPOISONED.COM HELPS

• CONSUMERS:
  • Sign-up for city-level alerts 
  • Search for incidents
  • Identify potentially risky places, leading to safer choices
• PUBLIC HEALTH DEPARTMENTS:
  • Get state-, city-, or county-level alerts
  • Supplement existing reporting systems
  • Enable better targeting of inspections
  • Identify potential outbreaks sooner
• COMPANIES:
  • Subscription to Enterprise Level Access, includes:
    • Early warning alerts service
    • Benchmarking and competitive ranking analysis
    • Access to detailed epidemiology reports
    • Connect with affected consumers

Iwaspoisoned.com was founded as a solution that could be applied across the entire spectrum of food poisoning cases: from consumers who report illnesses and receive alerts where they live or travel, to companies who track reports on their restaurants, to public health departments who need to supplement existing systems. Iwaspoisoned.com serves every constituency out there to ultimately ensure that consumers have a safe dining experience.

HOW IWASPOISONED.COM BEGAN

Iwaspoisoned.com developed organically, after its founder, Patrick Quade, experienced an excruciating bout of food poisoning. “When you experience something that traumatic, you want to tell people about it,” said Patrick. “In doing so, I found that many people had similar stories about food poisoning and that got me thinking: if enough people shared these stories as they occurred, could they prevent others from getting sick?”.

Patrick left his career on Wall Street and applied his analytical knowledge, interest in technology, and lifelong love of food to the task of developing a space specifically for that purpose. The result was iwaspoisoned.com, where fellow sufferers of food poisoning could report their experiences.

STATUS & MILESTONES
Iwaspoisoned.com continues to serve consumers with early outbreak detection alerts, and we detected the Norovirus Outbreak in Virginia’s Chipotle store earlier in July 2017
We are serving more and more consumers and the key statistics for 2017 are presented below:

▪ Over 17,000 reports in 2017 (as of September 30th, 2017)
▪ Over 60,000 page views per month.
▪ We have public health subscribers in 45 states in the USA.
▪ Over 18000 consumers subscribed to free “Alerts for your City” service.
▪ Extending our service internationally we have Public Health Departments from Singapore, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany (5 countries) subscribed to our Alerts service.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT IWASPOISONED.COM

* Food Safety News: Customers who ate at the Chipotle Mexican Grill location in Sterling, VA, have been posting reports of foodborne illnesses along with receipts from the restaurant and documents from their doctors on the website iwaspoisoned.com.

* Bloomberg: The outbreak first came to light after Chipotle closed a location in Sterling, Virginia, on Monday, citing a “small number” of illnesses. But the tally has climbed higher. Patrick Quade, who runs the website Iwaspoisoned.com, said that 137 people have reported getting sick after visiting that Chipotle.

* Mashable : “ IWasPoisoned.com does something even better than that: it allows people the unique pleasure of identifying restaurants where     they believe they've been food poisoned, then telling the explosive diarrhea stories we've been taught are too "shameful" for the general public.
We all blow chunks every now and again. It's time we stopped hiding”

* NRN : Iwaspoisoned.com seeks to provide data to consumers, and restaurants, and prevent outbreaks

* The Florida Department of Health, Food, and Waterborne Disease Program: “Partnering with iwaspoisoned.com was a logical choice.”

* Scientific community: “Iwaspoisoned.com provides a unique service that has already proven useful in detecting common source outbreaks.  Its use continues to grow as more food safety professionals learn about its potential.” Lee-Ann Jaykus, Ph.D. Department of Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutrition Sciences North Carolina State University (NCSU) & Benjamin Chapman Ph.D. Associate Professor, Food Safety Specialist (NCSU)

Iwaspoisoned.com is the #1 online repository for reported food poisoning incidents. For more information on iwaspoisoned.com or to talk with founder Patrick Quade, please contact patrick@iwaspoisoned.com