Public health technology · Foodborne illness surveillance
Dinesafe
A consumer complaint form that grew into an outbreak early warning system. Iwaspoisoned.com, the crowdsourcing platform Dinesafe operates, has logged reports of suspected food poisoning since 2009 and now feeds data to hundreds of public health agencies and restaurant chains.
A deli sandwich in Tribeca
In 2008, Patrick Quade stopped at a corner deli near his office at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan for a BLT wrap. By the next day he was doubled over with symptoms so severe that, as he later told NPR, “it was like some force was just wringing my stomach out.” He called the deli to warn them. They hung up on him.
In 2009 he built a simple website to find out whether he was alone: iwaspoisoned.com, a form where anyone could report a suspected case of food poisoning and name the restaurant.
The gap it is aimed at
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that foodborne illness sickens about 48 million people in the United States every year and kills roughly 3,000, figures Quade has cited in describing the company’s mission. The company puts the national economic cost at $55 billion to $92 billion a year. Most cases never reach a health department: people recover in a day or two, assume it was a stomach bug, and never call anyone.
Traditional foodborne illness surveillance runs through doctors, labs and health department phone lines, a system built around confirmed, lab-tested cases. It is not built to catch a cluster of unconfirmed complaints fast enough to matter. Iwaspoisoned.com fills that gap: a public complaint box that health departments and restaurant chains can both watch in real time.
From trader to founder
Quade was not a public health researcher. Before iwaspoisoned.com, he spent years at Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities Group, becoming global head of market structure and supervising the US interest rate swaps desk; earlier he consulted for JPMorgan. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Charles Sturt University, Australia.
The company built around the platform, Dinesafe, is dated by Y Combinator to 2016, seven years after iwaspoisoned.com went live. The two names are used almost interchangeably in the company’s materials, and Quade is the sole named founder and CEO of both. His listed location has shifted: an undated World Bank Blogs bio places him in New York, while Dinesafe’s 2026 site lists its headquarters, and its founder, in Austin, Texas.
Going enterprise
In 2018 Quade brought Dinesafe through Y Combinator’s Summer batch, building a data business around the consumer site: daily and intraday outbreak alerts, brand benchmarking, secure messaging and an API, sold mainly to restaurant chains, food producers, and grocery and convenience retailers. In his own account of the launch, Quade said a third of the top 50 US restaurant chains were already on the platform, and that it held surveillance partnerships in six countries and with more than 350 US public health agencies, covering, he said, 90 percent of the country by population.
The FDA became a formal partner in 2021, when its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition awarded Dinesafe.org a contract for data and analytics support “to advance understanding of foodborne illness dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic period,” according to the company’s own release. NC State researchers Ben Chapman and Lee-Ann Jaykus, both listed as advisors, were quoted praising the arrangement in that release. No independent account of the contract, its dollar value, or an FDA solicitation number turned up in the public record checked for this profile.
Catching outbreaks before health departments did
By November 2017, NPR reported iwaspoisoned.com had logged more than 75,000 reports from 90 countries and 46 US states, with 20,000 consumers and 350 health agencies subscribed to alerts. NPR credited it with flagging clusters ahead of official confirmation at a Chipotle in Simi Valley, California in 2015, an Applebee’s in Michigan in 2016, a Melting Pot in Tacoma, Washington in 2017, and a Georgia Tech dining hall that October. A report on the site also pointed Wisconsin’s Marathon County Health Department to a shop later confirmed to have caused a norovirus outbreak sickening about 100 people.
Local officials credited the site with speeding response. “It makes our job as food police easier,” said David Banasynski, health inspector for Schaumburg, Illinois, describing how a complaint could reach him in minutes rather than the days it took through the county. Food microbiologist Lee Ann Jaykus of NC State, who joined the platform’s advisory board in 2016, told NPR it was “particularly good at identifying norovirus outbreaks,” a category traditional surveillance struggles to track since so few cases are lab confirmed.
By 2024 the company said its partner count had grown past 400 organizations, and it had begun collaborating with Jaykus’s team at NC State on norovirus correlation research, presented that July at the IAFP annual meeting. A LinkedIn post from March 2024 put the platform’s reach at 170-plus countries and seven languages. Unlike the 2017 JMIR figures, none of these newer numbers have appeared in an independently reviewed publication.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Report volume, 2017 | 49,000-plus reports from 89 countries by mid-2017, 95.51% naming a restaurant as the suspected source, per the peer-reviewed paper Quade co-authored with Boston University researcher Elaine Okanyene Nsoesie. | Public record |
| Report volume, 2024 | Company materials describe reports from 170-plus countries in 7 languages and over 400 public health partners, up from the 90 countries and 350 partners reported to NPR in 2017. Not independently re-measured. | Company-stated |
| Early outbreak flags | NPR named four instances where the site surfaced a cluster of reports before health officials confirmed an outbreak, including a 2015 Chipotle location and a Wisconsin shop later tied to confirmed norovirus. | Independent |
| Health department reach, 2017 | The JMIR paper reports the platform was used by health departments in 45 of 50 US states, or 90%, as of 2017. | Public record |
| FDA contract | Dinesafe.org says CFSAN awarded it a contract in 2021 for crowdsourced data and analytics during COVID-19. No solicitation number, contract value, or independent confirmation was found for this profile. | Company-stated |
| Third-party academic citations | Dinesafe’s bibliography page lists later papers it says used iwaspoisoned.com data, including a 2023 Foodborne Pathogens and Disease study and a 2022 International Journal of Infectious Diseases study. Not independently retrieved for this profile. | Company-curated |
| Norovirus correlation study, 2024 | Presented at the IAFP annual meeting with NC State’s Lee-Ann Jaykus as co-author, correlating self-reported symptoms with a CDC-linked surveillance network. No peer-reviewed publication of this study was found. | Company-stated |
| Founding date and location | Y Combinator dates Dinesafe to 2016 and the platform to 2009. A Tracxn profile instead lists 2015 as the founding year and New York City as headquarters, against the company’s own 2026 site, which lists Austin, Texas. | Differs across records |
| Outside funding | No SEC Form D was found under either the Dinesafe or Iwaspoisoned name. A paywalled Tracxn listing claims one undisclosed “Seed” round dated Jul 25, 2018, with financial figures that cannot be verified. | Not found |
Read plainly, the record shows a platform with a decade and a half of complaint data, one peer-reviewed paper from 2017, and a working relationship with the FDA and NC State that has continued for years. What has not surfaced is a second peer-reviewed paper, an independently confirmed value for the FDA contract, or any documented outside investment. The company’s own counts have kept climbing since 2017 without independent verification.
What to watch
- Whether the 2024 norovirus correlation study with NC State is submitted for peer review.
- Independent confirmation of the FDA CFSAN contract’s scope and value, not found for this profile.
- Any Form D or documented funding round; none has surfaced since the 2018 YC batch.
- Whether the company settles the conflicting founding dates and headquarters across Y Combinator, Tracxn and its own site.
In their words
“Food poisoning kills 3,000 people a year,”
Patrick Quade, founder and CEO, to NPR, 2017 · Independent
“I thought to myself, I don’t know for sure it was the deli. But what if 30 or 40 people in the neighborhood went to that deli and also got sick? Who would know?”
Patrick Quade, to NPR, 2017 · Independent
“a cluster of reports around a venue or source of food can be a powerful indicator.”
Patrick Quade, to NPR, 2017 · Independent
“It makes our job as food police easier,”
David Banasynski, health inspector, Schaumburg, Illinois, to NPR, 2017 · Independent
“The site is particularly good at identifying norovirus outbreaks,”
Lee Ann Jaykus, food microbiologist, North Carolina State University, to NPR, 2017 · Independent
“Utilizing crowd sourced data is a progressive approach to food safety that has many positive aspects, especially when it comes to close-to real time decision making”
Ben Chapman, PhD, NC State University, quoted in Dinesafe’s FDA contract release, 2021 · Company release
“The Dinesafe platform and iwaspoisoned data have proven many times to surface unique signals that can be directly linked to foodborne disease outbreaks, often in near real-time.”
Lee-Ann Jaykus, PhD, NC State University, quoted in Dinesafe’s FDA contract release, 2021 · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordA Platform for Crowdsourced Foodborne Illness Surveillance: Description of Users and Reports, Quade and Nsoesie
- Independent‘I Was Poisoned’: Can Crowdsourcing Food Illnesses Help Stop Outbreaks?
- IndependentY Combinator company page for Dinesafe
- CompanyDinesafe YC S18 launch post
- CompanyPatrick Quade author bio
- CompanyAbout Patrick Quade
- CompanyFDA Awards Contract to Dinesafe.org
- CompanyThe Science Behind Iwaspoisoned, bibliography page
- CompanyMapping DineSafe’s Nationwide Public Health Partnership Reach
- CompanyDineSafe/Iwaspoisoned Data and Insights Featured at the IAFP Annual Meeting
- CompanyDineSafe Presents at FDA Retail Food Protection Seminar and IEHA Annual Education Conference
- CompanyDineSafe LinkedIn company post
- CompanyIn the Media, excerpt attributed to The New York Times
- AggregatorDinesafe company profile
- CompanyNews: 2024 Environmental Health Symposium recap
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
