Restaurant general liability insurance, and where the food claim lands
General liability pays claims from people who are not your employees: the guest who falls, the coat a server ruins, the ad that misleads. A restaurant's version carries a twist most explanations skip. On the standard ISO restaurant form, a claim that your food made someone sick is a products-completed operations claim even though it happened at your table, and it draws on a different limit than the fall did.
What coverage a restaurant needsThe four categories, as they show up in a dining room
The NAIC's consumer guide describes a commercial general liability policy as covering four categories of events a business can be held responsible for: bodily injury, damage to others' property, personal injury including slander and libel, and false or misleading advertising (NAIC, Insure U: Small Business Insurance). In a restaurant, bodily injury is the wet floor by the host stand and the child who pulls a hot plate off a table. Damage to others' property is the tray into the customer's laptop and the valet dent. Personal injury is the manager who tells a review site a critic was drunk. Advertising injury is the menu that borrows a competitor's trademark. All four live under the same policy, and the first two are the ones a kitchen actually files.
What the four categories do not say is which hazard a claim belongs to, and in a restaurant that question decides which limit pays. A general liability policy separates the premises and operations hazard from the products-completed operations hazard, and that split is the subject of the next section.
Food-borne illness is a products claim, even at your own table
IRMI's glossary defines products-completed operations as the hazard encompassing liability arising out of the insured's products or business operations conducted away from the insured's premises once those operations have been completed or abandoned (IRMI, products-completed operations). Read that definition literally and a restaurant has a problem: the product is consumed on the premises, so a food poisoning claim would seem to fall outside the products hazard and inside the premises hazard. ISO resolved it with an endorsement. Its classification table requires the Products-Completed Operations Hazard Redefined endorsement, form CG 24 07, on a restaurant's policy, and the endorsement removes the away-from-premises requirement. IRMI's example is exact: a claim by a customer alleging food poisoning from a meal eaten at the restaurant is included within the restaurant's products-completed operations hazard despite the injury taking place on the premises (IRMI, The Hazards of Products and Completed Operations).
Why an operator should care: the CGL form carries six limits, and one of them is the products-completed operations aggregate, separate from the general aggregate. A norovirus weekend that produces a dozen claims draws down the products aggregate, and the premises aggregate that the slip-and-fall claims use is untouched by it. Two consequences follow. First, when you read a quote, the products-completed operations aggregate is the number that answers the kitchen's most characteristic claim, and it is the one people skip. Second, the endorsement moves the claim between hazards; it does not waive the policy's exclusions, and it does not turn a first-party recall cost into a liability claim.
On that last point, the Insurance Information Institute notes that product liability coverage can be added to a general liability policy or bought as a standalone policy, and separately that a business whose product could be contaminated, food among its examples, may want to consider adding contamination coverage for recall costs such as laboratory analysis and transportation (Insurance Information Institute, product liability, recall and contamination). The liability policy answers the sick customer. It does not pay to pull and test the lot. Ask for both by name if a recall would end you.
One caution. IRMI describes the standard ISO structure. A carrier writing a restaurant program on its own form may define the hazards differently, so the question to put to an agent is not "does this cover food poisoning" but "under which hazard, against which aggregate, and is the products-completed operations hazard redefined for on-premises consumption."
What the policy leaves to other lines
Liquor comes first because it is the one that bites. The Insurance Information Institute is direct: if you do not purchase liquor liability coverage, your standard commercial general liability policy does not protect your business against liquor-related claims (Insurance Information Institute, commercial general liability insurance). For a restaurant with a wine list that is an endorsement conversation; for a place where drinks are the business it is the central coverage, and the bar and restaurant insurance page is written around it.
The NAIC also lists professional liability for errors and omissions among the risks a CGL policy does not protect against (NAIC). A line cook is not a professional in that sense, but a caterer who plans and executes an event is closer to one, which is why the catering insurance page raises the question. Injuries to your own staff go to workers compensation, vehicles go to commercial auto, and your own building and equipment go to property and equipment breakdown coverage. General liability is about what you owe others.
How the line sits inside the whole program, with the property and workers compensation pieces in proportion, is on the restaurant business insurance page. The other coverage explainers are on the coverage hub.