Insure Your Future

3 Liability Risks That Restaurants Face And Need Insurance For

26 March 2020 by Sue Palmer

Restaurants serve a lot of customers and have multi-faceted operations, and this combination exposes restaurants to a variety of liability risks. If you run a dining establishment, here are three liability risks that you should get insurance for.

1. Someone Slips and Falls at the Eatery

One of the most common risks that many businesses face is the potential of a slip-and-fall injury. Should someone who visits your restaurant slip, trip, or otherwise fall, your business could be held financially liable for any injury that results from the fall. While most falls are minor, some can result in serious fractures, concussions, or other injuries that come with high medical costs.

To protect against this, your restaurant should have premises liability coverage. This coverage will cover slip-and-fall claims made by diners, vendors, or anyone else who comes to your eatery's property but doesn't work for the restaurant. The only people the coverage doesn't apply to are employees, who receive injury coverage through workers' compensation insurance.

Premises liability coverage may be purchased on its own, but it's more commonly acquired as part of a general liability policy. General liability often combines this protection with coverage against slander, libel, and false advertising lawsuits. While most restaurants don't face such lawsuits, it's a fairly standard practice to get protection against them.

2. A Diner Becomes Too Intoxicated

When a diner becomes too intoxicated with alcohol, any number of bad things can happen. They might fall and hurt themselves, get into a fight, or cause a DUI accident on the way home. Some insurance policies will exclude instances like these when alcohol is involved.

To protect against alcohol-induced incidents, your restaurant should have liquor liability coverage. This will provide protection against an array of things that can happen when a diner is over-served.

3. Many Diners Contract Food Poisoning

Food poisoning can be a relatively minor illness that people get over fairly quickly, but in some cases, it can be extremely severe. Poisoning from salmonella or E. coli bacteria, for instance, can cause serious illness and even death in a few instances.

If your restaurant spreads a serious case of food poisoning to many diners, the business could be held responsible in the same way as it would be held responsible for an injury. In this case, you'd want product liability insurance. Product liability policies protect against illness and injury caused by products that a business sells -- and food is a product that your restaurant offers.

To learn more, contact a company that offers liability insurance coverage.

Share  

Search