Kitchen Injuries: Why Frequency Beats Severity in Pricing

The kitchen is busy, hot, and fast. Most injuries are small. Cuts, burns, slips. The kind you patch up and keep moving.

Those are the injuries that move pricing.

If you want the quick read, start with Kitchen Injury Frequency: The Workers Comp Driver. This post goes deeper on why frequency matters so much.

What’s really going on

Workers comp is priced on expected losses. In restaurants, that expectation is driven by how often people get hurt, not just how badly.

Cuts and burns are not dramatic, but they are predictable. The predictability is what moves pricing. If a carrier sees small injuries every month, they treat it as a pattern, not a fluke.

A single severe claim is costly, but it is also rare. A steady pattern of small claims is a signal. It tells the carrier that the risk is built into the operation, not just bad luck.

That is why two restaurants with the same payroll can see different rates. One has occasional issues. The other has a pattern. The pattern wins.

You can feel this in the kitchen. A new line cook, a faster pace, a tighter space. Those things do not show up on a policy, but they show up in the losses.

High turnover makes this worse. Every new person resets the risk curve. Even a good training program cannot fully offset the first month learning curve.

Seasonal hiring amplifies it. If you bring on a new crew every few months, the frequency curve never settles. That is not a moral failure, it is just math.

Equipment maintenance plays a quiet role. Dull knives, slick mats, and loose handles create the small injuries that add up over the year.

If you keep a simple injury log by shift, you can see patterns that the premium already sees. That makes fixes more obvious.

Tradeoffs and gotchas

The first gotcha is treating small injuries as invisible. They are not. A few small claims show up in the loss history and can drive renewal pricing.

Another gotcha is the idea that only severe injuries matter. Severity is expensive, but frequency is what makes a book look unstable. Carriers get nervous when the small claims never stop.

The second gotcha is payroll classification. If kitchen staff are classified incorrectly, the premium can be low up front and painful at audit. Class Codes and Tip Wages: The Audit Surprise lays out how that happens.

The third gotcha is thinking frequency is a kitchen-only issue. It is not. Frequency is a pricing driver across industries. For a clean parallel, Loss Frequency vs Severity for Small Contractors explains the same logic in construction.

A quieter gotcha is underreporting. If staff stop reporting small injuries, the culture suffers and the bigger injuries still land. The premium may look better for a season, but the long-term cost usually climbs.

There is also the light-duty gap. If you cannot bring someone back on light duty, a minor injury can turn into a longer claim. That changes both the experience and the pricing signal.

Return-to-work options are especially hard in a small kitchen. If there is no safe station for a recovering worker, the claim stays open longer. That is one of the quiet reasons small shops pay more.

Price levers or decision factors

These are the levers that affect frequency more than owners expect:

• Training pace. New hires in their first month drive a lot of small injuries.
• Workflow design. Tight spaces and rushed handoffs create predictable accidents.
• Shift structure. Long, late shifts raise the chance of mistakes.
• Incident reporting. Clear reporting can help prevent repeat injuries, but it also surfaces the pattern.
• Payroll classification. If the code does not match the work, the premium will change at audit.

Knife storage, floor mats, and burn protocols sound small, but they show up in claim counts. The fixes are often boring, which is why they work.

Return-to-work planning matters too. Having a light-duty plan can shorten claim duration and reduce the cost signal, even when the injury itself was unavoidable.

If you want a very practical starting point, track injuries by station. If most cuts happen at prep, fix prep workflow first. The pricing will follow the pattern you change.

If you are short on time, focus on the first hour of each shift. That is when new hands and cold equipment tend to cause the most mistakes.

Shift changeovers are another weak spot worth a quick check.

If the market tightens, frequency becomes even more important. Loss Cycles: Why Construction Tightens First shows how carriers react when losses rise.

Simple decision rule

If you have more than a couple of comp claims a year, focus on process before you focus on premium. Pricing follows behavior. The only stable fix is to change the behavior.

Next step

Pick one common injury type and track it for 90 days. If it repeats, fix the workflow around it. That single change will do more for premium than most shopping will.

Then tell the crew why you changed it.

They will follow what they understand.

Simple wins add up fast.

They compound.

Minnesota note: rates and carrier appetite can swing by county, so a Twin Cities renewal isn’t always a perfect proxy for greater Minnesota.