A food poisoning complaint response letter is a formal letter, that is prepared by a restaurant, hotel, cafe, or any eating place, and is addressed to the customer, who has filed a complaint about getting food poisoning by eating the restaurant’s food. In this letter, the restaurant tries to respond to the customer’s complaint and provides an explanation. If the restaurant is responsible for the customer’s food positioning, it would apologize and try to compensate the customer, to avoid negative publicity. However, if the restaurant is not at fault, it would provide the evidence and documents to support its case.
Sometimes, a customer may get sick after eating food from outside. In such a case, he might launch a complaint, and seek an explanation. The eating place should not ignore the complaint, and it is important to reply to and satisfy the customer properly. Otherwise, if a customer would give negative reviews on widely used social media, the restaurant would suffer huge losses.
Restaurants may have to go out of their way to please the angry customer, but it needs to be done. The correspondence with the customer is, usually, carried out by writing him a food poisoning complaint response letter. The content may vary from one letter to the other depending on:
- The restaurant’s policies,
- The severity of food poisoning and customer complaint,
- The negative reviews,
- Effects on the organization,
- The guilty party,
- Compensation offered by the restaurant, etc.
However, generally, the following information is included in such letters:
- Date.
- Customer details.
- Restaurant details.
- Reference to the customer’s food poisoning complaint.
- Response to the complaint, including acceptance of the mistake (if the restaurant is guilty), explanations (if the restaurant is not at fault), etc.
- Any attached documents.
- Apologize for the bad experience.
- Any compensation or offers.
- Request for the removal of negative reviews.
Sample Food Poisoning Complaint Response Letter
Dear Ms. Samantha,
I am writing this letter in response to your food poisoning complaint on 4th august 20XX.
We apologize that you suffered from food poisoning after you ate at our ABC café on 3rd August 20XX. However, after your complaint, we immediately sent the leftover food to the testing lab to find out, if there was something wrong with it. As per the lab report (attached), the food was fine, and no bacteria was found. To dig deeper, we consulted a doctor (the notes and report are attached) and found that the stomach bacteria show its effect after few days, which indicates that maybe the food poisoning, that you had to bear, was due to some other food, that you ate few days before you came to our restaurant.
We are sorry that you got sick, but we hope that you will understand that it was not our fault. We tried to provide the evidence and explanations, but if you are still not satisfied, let us know how we can help further. We will be happy to do that.
We request you to, kindly, remove your negative reviews about our café from our official Facebook page. We would highly appreciate it if you could comment about our customer service and your complaint handling. We would be highly grateful.
We would also like to invite you for a hi-tea buffet at our cafe so that we can get another chance to serve you better, and you can enjoy our food. Let us know of your availability.
Awaiting your response. Thank you.
Regards,
Johnathan Smith.
