 The restaurant business can be difficult to predict: A sick employee, a piece of key equipment in disrepair, or weather conditions that result in a long line out your door can quickly turn a seemingly routine day into a unmanageable one. When this happens, it’s only natural to switch into a different gear where you’re putting out fires – taking on some extra tasks here or skipping some safety checks there just to keep up with what’s happening in the moment. But this can cause a ripple effect that’s difficult to reverse. Specifically, what happens to your procedures when conditions settle down and your operation seems to be flowing as it should? Junior members of the team who have observed the restaurant in fire-fighting mode now know there are some tasks that can be skipped if need be. So do they really need to be done as regularly as they were initially told? Being in fire-fighting mode on a regular basis can erode your management’s credibility and lead to a decline in food safety. To stop repeating the pattern, it can help to take a step back and assess how often you’re short on staff, having audits or inspections, or otherwise having to scramble to dig yourself out of challenging situations. Understand where you’re slipping so you can build a backup plan to ensure you’re still upholding your food safety procedures, identify tools or automations that might support you, and ask for help from your team and upper management.
 In a recent podcast with Food Safety Magazine, food safety expert Francine Shaw said she has pulled up to restaurant drive-thrus and received food from employees wearing cleaning gloves, as well as seen restaurant staff push trash down into a bin with a gloved hand. It may sound disgusting, but it’s also understandable: If these restaurant employees had been using their bare hands, they probably would have realized they were putting food safety at risk, or at least experienced a major “ick” factor that reminded them to wash their hands. But gloves can give a person a false sense of security, as well as create a sensory barrier that makes it easier to overlook a food safety risk. Looking at your business, how well does your team follow protocols around handwashing and gloves? Do they ensure their hands are clean when they put on a new pair? Do you see people wearing multiple pairs at once? Do they understand that the gloves are there to protect guests and not the wearer? It may be helpful to review your training protocols around gloves so that they can best support your food safety and not bring new risks into it. A refresher could be especially important if you’re serving more food offsite this summer and employees’ access to handwashing sinks looks different than it does on your premises.
 If your restaurant is slipping up on food safety – or simply has areas where it can perform even better – it’s possible your team may not necessarily see the connection between what they do each day and the impacts on the health and safety of your guests. This isn’t just about the people preparing your food. It’s about people at every level of your organization who play a role in delivering the best possible experience for guests – even if they don’t know it. For example, the complex tasks your kitchen has to complete tend to carry greater risk. They’re more difficult to get right. Making these tasks simpler and easier may require looking at them in a different way. Your connections and partnerships with other parts of your operation can be helpful here in making positive changes. Involving partners from the beginning and as a regular part of the job can make them more invested in food safety as foundational to the overall success of the business – not something that is layered on top as extra information that needs to be learned and applied by a select group. In a recent webinar from Food Safety Magazine, Steven Lyon, director of food safety at Chick-fil-A, shared an example of how such connections can be helpful: He said that Chick-fil-A is the world’s No. 2 buyer of lemons, after Walmart. Team members used to hand-squeeze every lemon, handling 50 cases of lemons a day – not a great experience for team members and a burden on operational storage space. But the team came up with the idea of transitioning to high-pressure-process lemon juice to ease those strains – and over the course of a multi-year period, they were able to get buy-in across the business about the value of the change. Where might your business benefit – in safety, costs savings or other areas – from gathering the input and buy-in of people across your operation?
 The FDA is considering cutting funding for state food inspections, which currently total about 5,700 – a large portion of the country’s food safety audits. This comes at a time when foodborne illness outbreaks are an ongoing threat. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 12 multi-state outbreaks in the U.S. in 2022, nine in 2023, and four in the first four months of 2024. Third-party inspections can and do help businesses identify risks and make corrections before they balloon into larger problems. In the meantime, foodservice operations may have to take some steps on their own to manage their role in protecting against foodborne illness, including shrinking and closely managing the food supply chain and securing relationships with suppliers who are committed to protecting food safety and have systems in place to identify risks and alert businesses to them in real time.
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