Protect Your Business From Hot Coffee Burns and Lawsuits With These Safety Tools
As coffee experts with more than four decades of experience in the coffee and tea industries, we understand how hot beverages need to be brewed and served for optimal flavor, depth, and enjoyment. And having consulted on more than 70 hot beverage spill burn cases, we’re also aware of the dangers—and costs—when hot coffee burns happen.
Our team at Dan Cox & Associates created safety resources designed to help you:
- Prevent hot beverage spills
- Protect your customers and employees
- Defend your business should a hot coffee burn or other hot beverage spill occur
Hot Beverage Safety Tools: Who Needs Them and Why
Handling hot beverages safety poster
What it is: A succinct, clear safety poster for use in restaurants, coffee bars, and other food service businesses that serve hot beverages. The poster is divided into three sections that outline:
- Best practices for handling and serving hot beverages
- How to minimize injury in the immediate aftermath of a spill
- How to collect and preserve critical information in an incident report to protect the business and defend a lawsuit
With straightforward messaging and an eye-catching design, the poster is designed to be displayed where it is easily seen by employees and can be readily referred to.
Who needs it: Restaurants, coffee bars, and any food service businesses where employees serve hot beverages—including airlines, cruise ships and ferries, trains, and more.
How it helps:
- Keeps crucial information at hand, reinforcing best practices for hot beverage service where employees can quickly see them
- Prompts time-sensitive safety actions to reduce the severity of burns in case of a spill
- Informs proactive record-keeping to protect your brand’s reputation and bottom line in case of legal action
- Supports a comprehensive hot beverage safety training program
- Provides long-lasting value; the contents of the poster do not require annual updating
Handling Hot Coffee (Red Barn Books, 2013)
What it is: Coffee expert Dan Cox’s comprehensive work on the history of brewing coffee and the justification of the science behind the high temperatures required for brewing and serving hot beverages. This book also covers hot beverage burns in-depth, outlining the many factors that contribute to a burn’s severity, and walks through a history of hot coffee burn litigation and common claims.
Who needs it: Lawyers for both the plaintiff and the defense in a hot beverage lawsuit, legal teams that serve insurance companies that underwrite any food service business serving hot beverages.
How it helps:
- Understanding the product and processes behind brewing, holding, and serving hot drinks—that is, knowing what goes into making a great cup of coffee—is a critical foundation for making a legal case that serving coffee and espresso drinks, tea, steamed milk, and other liquids at temperatures hot enough to cause significant injury is not (per se) an act of negligence.
- Understanding the factors that contribute to the severity of hot coffee burns provides a bigger picture to understand the incident beyond a singular focus on beverage temperature.
- Learning from the history of hot beverage lawsuits helps businesses better prepare and train to protect their customers, their employees, and their bottom line.
Coffee: Too Hot to Handle or Mishandled? (Onion River Press, 2019)
What it is: The second book from coffee expert and consultant Dan Cox, Handling Hot Coffee provides an up-to-date legal review of hot beverage litigation and focuses on handling procedures, best practices, and recommendations for spill prevention.
Who needs it: All lawyers involved in hot beverage litigation, including those representing the foodservice operator, insurance companies, equipment and cup manufacturers, for both the plaintiff and defendant. Also foodservice operators and company safety and training managers for all businesses that serve hot beverages, including fast service and fine dining restaurants, airlines, cruise ships and ferries, trains, and more.
How it helps: Protect your business from hot coffee burn litigation with an understanding of
- best practices for serving, including recommendations for cups and lid handling to prevent spills and burns
- warning labels and employee training to help protect customers and employees
- the elements that contribute to the severity of a spill burn
- the role of human error in hot beverage spills
- History and recent case studies of hot beverage spill and burn litigation to help defend against lawsuits
Buy Coffee: Too Hot to Handle or Mishandled? here.
Hot coffee burns and lawsuits hurt, damage, and scar. These safety resources help you prevent hot beverage spills, protect your customers and employees from burns, and protect your business from hot beverage spill litigation. Buy them today!
