Food Cooling

At a glance

We looked at how cooling practices in restaurants like cooling food depth, pan ventilation, and time and temperature monitoring are linked to how fast food cools. We also looked at how restaurant and kitchen manager traits linked with use of methods that help cool food quickly and how restaurants cool food and whether they follow FDA advice. Learn what restaurants and food safety programs can do to improve food cooling practices in their restaurants.

Food workers in a kitchen. One has a large pan of food.

Key takeaways from three scientific studies

Federal guidelines recommend several practices for cooling food, but not all restaurants follow them. Food safety programs and restaurants can improve cooling practices by:

  • Focusing intervention efforts on independent and smaller restaurants
  • Following the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Food Code cooling guidelines
  • Encouraging or requiring kitchen managers to be certified in food safety

Why this is important

Hot food needs to be cooled quickly to prevent foodborne illness outbreaks caused by germs. Ten years of data (1998 to 2008) show 504 outbreaks of foodborne illness in restaurants were caused by hot food cooled too slowly.

What we learned

Common gaps in restaurant cooling practices include failure to use methods that help food cool quickly. These gaps include:

  • Not monitoring the temperature of food in cooling process. One in 7 restaurants stored foods in refrigerators above 41°F
  • Storing food in cooling process in containers deeper than 3 inches. Four in 10 restaurants placed hot foods in these kinds of containers
  • Not ventilating food in cooling process. One in 4 restaurants did not loosely cover food in cooling process to ventilate and protect it from contamination

Restaurants with certified kitchen managers and that were chain-owned were more likely to use methods that help food cool quickly.

More Information

Journal articles this plain language summary is based on: analysis of cooling practices, characteristics of cooling methods, and cooling practices

More practice summaries and investigation summaries.

About these studies‎

These studies were conducted by the Environmental Health Specialists Network (EHS-Net). EHS-Net is a federally funded collaboration of federal, state, and local environmental health specialists and epidemiologists working to better understand the environmental causes of foodborne illness.
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Content Source:
National Center for Environmental Health