Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

Commercial general liability policies typically provide coverage to insureds for losses resulting from property damage caused by an “occurrence,” usually defined in the policy as “an accident, including continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same harmful conditions.” In the context of food recalls, however, the exact cause of the food damage, whether contamination, spoilage or something else, may be unknown. This creates uncertainty, and in turn, a coverage dispute, over whether the cause of damage was indeed accidental, and thus a covered “occurrence.” In a recent article for Food Safety Magazine, Syed Ahmad and I analyze three recent cases involving coverage for food industry insureds where the courts found the cause of loss to constitute an “occurrence,” triggering the policy’s coverage.  The full article is available here.