Are There "Ratatouille" Restaurants? On Anticorrelation of Food Quality and Hygiene

Abstract

We study the empirical relationship between restaurants' efforts to maintain hygiene standards and their food quality scores, as provided by both professional reviewers and consumers. We first propose a flexible microeconomic model of product quality generation, in which the observed quality scores are Poisson-generated from the effort made by the firms. The first-order condition of a firm's profit maximization is used as a Poisson regression equation that relates two different aspects of product quality evaluation scores, notably hygiene and food quality. Then, by using data from the UK high-end restaurants, we show that this relationship is negative and statistically significant. Also, this negative correlation finding is robust across various model specifications and food quality measurements. This indicates that a higher food quality is generally associated with less effort to keep the kitchen clean. We find that 3% of Michelin-starred restaurants in our dataset have poor hygiene, while the same is true for only 2% of non-Michelin-starred restaurants. Our findings illuminate potential channels through which the anticorrelation between food quality and hygiene effort could be mitigated and can be helpful for hygiene inspectors in order to prioritize restaurants in their inspection schedule.

Keywords: Food quality, restaurants, consumer reviews, hygiene standards, certification

JEL Classification: L15, D22, I18