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Crisis communications requires light touch, legal actions

Chili’s Grill & Bar latest to be sued over alleged foreign object in food

Restaurateurs who find themselves with customers claiming to have discovered foreign objects in their food face a fine line between hospitable communications and legal cautions.

Michael Heenan, a corporate crisis consultant and owner of Heenan Communications in Sacramento, Calif., said, “It comes down to keeping your head when everyone about you is losing theirs.”

Restaurants often face claims — some legitimate and some bogus — surrounding foreign objects found in food. In the past week, Chili’s Grill & Bar was served with a personal industry lawsuit after a customer claimed she and her husband found a sewing needle in their mashed potatoes while dining at a local branch of the chain last July. Over the past few years, targets have included McDonald’s, T.G.I. Friday’s, Claim Jumper and Wendy’s.

The best tips for companies that face these types of claims, Heenan said, is to “remember who you are, what your brand is and communicate appropriately rather than communicating the way most of us do when we are in a pressure cooker, which is very, very imperfectly.”

Still, crisis communications seldom can follow a template in food-tampering cases, and companies need policies in place and staff members informed and practiced in how to deal with such incidents.

“It’s very difficult for hospitality brands,” Heenan said, “because these are built on courtesy, customer service and community members. Suddenly, they are communicating in a very curt, terse, legal and sort of chilly fashion. That’s how in crisis you end up having really good companies playing into the hands of plaintiffs or detractors who want to portray them as villains.”

In the Chili’s case, the plaintiffs, Ashley Phillips and her husband, Craig Phillips, claimed Chili’s took 52 days to get the needle to a lab for testing and that as a result she had to stop nursing her infant son. She told the local newspaper that had the restaurant taken action right away, she would have been inclined to let the issue drop.

A spokesperson for Brinker International Inc. of Dallas, the parent of the Chili’s chain, said the company could not comment on pending litigation.

An assistant to the plaintiff’s attorney, Mitchell Burns of Farmington, N.M., said the suit, which was filed in Aztec District Court in San Juan County, N.M., seeks unspecified damages.

A public relations professional who asked not to be identified because many clients are restaurant chains, said any foodservice operation can benefit from training staff to deal with complaints immediately as they arise, as well as consulting legal counsel.

Heenan, who consulted for supermarket company Safeway after congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others were shot earlier this year, and for California spinach growers during an E. coli bacteria outbreak in 2005-2006, said companies must separate levels of expertise within the company. Legal, operations and public relations have different roles and must work together.

“What I tell clients is that in the midst of a crisis, when everyone’s anxiety is high and everyone’s defensiveness is high and there are personal hurt feelings about the safety of the product or the reputation of your company, that is not the time to find out what the dynamic is within your company,” Heenan said.

For independent operators without a corporate infrastructure, Heenan said the job is much more sensitive. “If you are doing it more or less on your own,” he said, “it’s asking a lot. It’s a very stressful environment.”

“The usual mistakes are of the brittle, defensive and unsympathetic nature,” he said. “If you do nothing else as an individual owner, remember that you must put aside your anger and remember how poorly that looks to the rest of the world. They need to see how concerned you are.”

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Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].

 

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