 A gastrointestinal virus like norovirus can quickly wipe out your team, along with significant numbers of guests. Last year, a norovirus outbreak in North Carolina made headlines when more than 240 people complained of illness after dining at a sushi restaurant. The health risks are even more pronounced for residents and staff in adult care and senior living facilities, where high concentrations of people with weakened immune systems live in close proximity. Norovirus causes about half of all outbreaks of food-related illness – and it can spread to any food served raw or handled after being cooked. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most reported norovirus outbreaks are caused by people who touch or prepare food when they are sick, or by food that comes from contaminated water.
Now is a good time to remind staff of the risks, make sure frequently touched surfaces are regularly cleaned and sanitized, and refine a staffing plan to make sure you’re ready when illness strikes this season. People who are infected with norovirus can shed billions of norovirus particles in their feces or vomit. A person is most contagious when they feel sick with norovirus and during the first few days after they feel better. (Food workers should stay home when sick and for at least 48 hours after symptoms stop.) If a person works with food when they have norovirus, they can easily contaminate the food and drinks they touch. People who consume those contaminated items can also contract norovirus and become sick. It’s important for people who are sick to not prepare, serve, or touch food for others; to wash produce and cook seafood carefully; to practice proper hand hygiene; and to clean and disinfect contaminated surfaces after someone has become ill.  When the sliced onions served up on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders were part of an E. coli outbreak that killed one person and sickened 75 others in October, the incident highlighted the importance of partnerships across the supply chain. Problems can always happen, but when you have partners you can trust to be transparent, proactive and collaborative, you help ensure that those problems are quickly identified and prevented from growing. How well does this describe your network – and your interactions with it?
You may gain some peace of mind if you give your supply chain an informal audit to ensure it operates in a way that contains risks. A recent report from Modern Restaurant Management recommended some areas to assess: Break up silos. Moving to an interconnected model ensures consistent processes, data, and practices, which can help you avoid delays and inaccuracies. Make sure you’re built for speed. Recalls demand a rapid response, from the source to the end consumer. Each of your supply chain partners should be able to verify their inventory, remove contaminated items, and contribute to shared reporting in a timely way. Use standard processes. Uniform systems can simplify product tracking and removal if needed. Test your readiness. Run recall simulations with trading partners to clarify roles and identify knowledge gaps. Take clear action. Once a contaminated product is identified, be in a position to share targeted, actionable messages with stakeholders, including instructions and next steps. Finally, use technology to improve performance. It should enhance your traceability, help you automate processes, and enable you to communicate across your supply chain when you need to.  When you’re serving a high volume of guests while perhaps also onboarding new staff, working with a reduced team, or managing a new menu in the kitchen, it can be easy for the details of an order to get lost in translation. If you serve guests with visual or hearing impairments or compromised immune systems, or if you’re in charge of keeping track of the health details of the people you’re serving, those risks can climb exponentially. As a result, a person may be served food that triggers an allergy or worsens a health condition. Your ordering technology, paired with training, can be critical here. When you can connect your digital order to a kitchen display system, you shorten the chain of people between the guest and the person preparing the dish – and ensure the item that the guest ordered is the one seen by the person preparing it. Your ordering technology can involve multiple senses, so a guest’s directions are less likely to be misunderstood. It also helps you ensure that menu updates are made in real time, so the ingredient you had to substitute on your menu today is clear to the person ordering it (who may have placed the same order yesterday and assumes they are getting the exact dish). Beyond tech, your training can help your staff understand the “why” behind your food safety practices. If they appreciate what can go wrong when a guest is served an incorrect dish (as well as the significant amount of trust a guest is placing with them to get things right), they are more likely to take steps to clarify and verify the person’s order.
 Food allergies affect approximately 15 million people in the United States and are responsible for about 30,000 emergency room visits and 150–200 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Nearly half of fatal reactions come from food served in restaurants or other foodservice establishments, and managing allergies can be complex due to their changing nature. The economic impact in the U.S. is $25 billion annually, but the real danger is the potential for death, as seen in a recent case where a doctor with severe allergies died after eating at a Disney World restaurant despite warning the staff. Risks run even higher in places such as senior living facilities, where residents rely on others to keep them safe.
Conducting a risk assessment can help you identify potential hazards, determine who might be affected, and evaluate the effectiveness of current controls. It will help you incorporate safety protocols including allergen checklists, ingredient labeling, segregated workstations to prevent cross-contamination, and staff training to ensure you manage allergy risks according to each person’s role. Clear, consistent verbal and written communication with guests, staff, caterers and volunteers is critical. This includes keeping accurate records of ingredient changes, which can help prevent incidents and can support your defense of insurance claims as needed. Your actions can also provide an experience that builds trust and loyalty with guests. By designing allergens out of menus where possible, providing clear ingredient info, and showing empathy toward guests with allergies, you can ensure guest safety and satisfaction.  Preserving food safety in a grab-and-go era
Whether out of a need for convenience or an abundance of food choice, consumers have been reaching for grab-and-go foods more readily in recent years. These high-margin foods occupy increasingly larger footprints in the restaurants, grocery stores and convenience stores that sell them – and the market is predicted to grow further. The foods themselves are changing too: Unlike the highly processed, high-salt, high-sugar options that were once commonplace in this market, consumers are now seeking convenience foods that are fresh, healthy and contain fruit, vegetables and other whole foods. This adds a new wrinkle to food safety, putting pressure on operators to provide fresh prepared foods that inspire confidence in consumers. Indeed, Food Safety Magazine reported that safety standards are evolving in response to shifts in the prepared foods market, with shelf life and food safety becoming primary factors in operators’ selection of the producers of their grab-and-go foods. Producers of these foods tend to be a patchwork of national and regional suppliers focusing on specific food categories. As a result, a grocery store or café’s prepared foods case can represent a wide range of operating standards and safety protocols. When considering which externally sourced prepared foods to offer in your business, think about the complexities around the shelf life of items, what technologies and/or preservatives producers are using to extend shelf life, and how to be transparent with customers about the ingredients used in the grab-and-go foods you offer.  Do digital orders represent a high percentage of your overall sales? According to data from the National Restaurant Association, digital orders comprised 16 percent of all foodservice orders in 2023, more than triple the pre-pandemic share. This may call for new approaches to managing food safety. Foodservice businesses cause the highest number of foodborne illness outbreaks each year, according to the CDC. While the CDC doesn’t currently track foodborne illness outbreaks resulting from digital online orders or delivery from foodservice businesses, these orders create new vulnerabilities for the industry. As a recent Food Safety Magazine article explained, digital orders can rapidly increase the scale of orders coming into a restaurant, making it easier for safety monitoring tasks to slip through the cracks. There is more room for miscommunication to food handlers regarding allergen-free meals, or for allergen messaging that is central to the in-restaurant ordering process to be overlooked in digital channels. Placing orders in the hands of delivery drivers introduces additional risks. Technology can help businesses manage many of these hazards – by automating preparation tasks, housing allergen data online, and dialing down the volume of digital orders when needed, for example. But safety plans are needed to back up these tools. That includes having a process HACCP plan for every menu item prepared in the kitchen – especially the items most commonly ordered for delivery. Managers can also help ensure ingredients approved for a recipe aren’t substituted in the moment. In the event of a surge in digital orders, designated digital prep lines can help protect the safety of orders for delivery. Businesses preparing food in a ghost kitchen that processes orders for other brands can introduce food safety specifications to protect their menu and manage cross-contamination risks. Finally, training employees on the approved preparation method for each menu item, including the hazard controls for each dish, can serve as a safety net that reinforces all other controls.
 In your restaurant, to what extent do your staff simply expect to find intermittent food safety issues with the ingredients you bring into your business? A recent Food Safety Magazine article describes how in food processing facilities, there seems to be a focus on controlling as opposed to preventing certain food safety hazards. In other words, comments like “We expect to find Listeria in our plant” have become common. But this response is more about fighting fires than preventing them from happening – and this creates risks that trickle down to foodservice operations. When a food safety issue is tolerated and corrected on the spot without further action, tolerance becomes encouraged. From there, the problem is likely to become more common – for both the food processor and the restaurants downstream that serve its products. So within your foodservice business, how do you stop this downward drift in food safety standards? When someone on your team finds a problem, are they clear about what to do next? Do you have procedures in place to make sure the supplier is notified and can explain what sustainable steps they will take to prevent the issue from recurring? Finding weak points in your food safety procedures (internally and up the supply chain) and then taking prompt action can help ensure you’re not in permanent firefighting mode when it comes to your food safety.
 Some facets of food safety can’t be delegated to machines — equipment still needs to be cleaned, technology can malfunction, and staff need to understand how they can manually manage and protect food safety and quality in your operation. However, at a time when foodservice businesses need to use all of the staff they have available without cutting corners on key tasks, automation (supported through a kitchen’s interconnected sensors) can be critical in streamlining tasks and reducing costs. As a recent report from Modern Restaurant Management explains, these benefits are evident in restaurants using digitized logbooks and food monitoring systems. In real time, they can alert staff to early warning signs that a food safety issue is present, then trigger automated actions in response. Such tools can also ensure that potential food safety risks are caught after hours when no one is on your premises — a helpful benefit when severe weather is becoming a more frequent threat in many parts of the country.
 The rise of automation in restaurants has promised benefits including greater efficiency, consistency and revenue. (For example, a recent report about Sweetgreen’s first robotic Infinite Kitchen say the location has delivered restaurant-level margins of 31 percent, a 45 percent reduction in employee turnover, and a ten percent increase in check sizes.) As the minimum wage increases and restaurants continue to face other pressures, the drive for automation will only continue. But is food safety keeping up? Food safety expert Francine Shaw expressed some doubts in a recent podcast. She relayed how she had been asked to review the policies and procedures of a restaurant that was already operating automated restaurants in a number of states. But they lacked a HACCP plan and had no food safety management or personal hygiene plan of any kind. She made recommendations to this business but they decided not to follow them because of the expense. Such examples raise concerns: When the machines supporting a foodservice operation need to be broken down and cleaned every few hours, will the staff be trained and available to do that? Will the business be able to demonstrate to their insurer that automation is resulting in stronger food safety results? Food safety won’t be an automatic result of automation — it will require a plan that keeps pace with the advancement in other parts of a business.
 Protect the safety of prepared foods
Ready-to-eat convenience foods represent a growing portion of sales for restaurant brands across categories. Research from Innova Market Research found that three in five consumers are using convenience foods at least once per week, while one in five are using them more than once per day. As restaurants look to meet this rising demand, however, they also face new potential risks with regard to food safety (not to mention food waste). If you’re offering more convenience foods nowadays, is there room for you to manage these risks more effectively using staff training, improving hygiene practices or refining the organization of your prepared foods case? For example, if you have an excess amount of a protein near the end of its shelf life and incorporate it into a soup or sandwich for your prepared foods case, how are you ensuring that it is served for the right amount of time before being removed? If you discount these foods in order to clear them, how can you preserve guest trust in your food safety? How can you push the envelope with ingredient innovation with these foods and ensure your food safety practices keep pace with those changes as needed? A recent report from Food Safety Magazine outlines some of the risks that these foods can pose — and the questions operators can ask themselves to make sure they are making the most of the opportunity to capture guest interest in fresh-prepared foods while minimizing their risks. |
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