 September is Food Safety Education Month. Use the occasion to reinforce key messages in your food safety training, bring some additional focus to areas you need to improve, and use quizzes, contests and rewards to make this month’s training something that staff will remember and enjoy. It’s chance for you to reset your connection with your team: Research published by QSR Magazine found that nearly 70 percent of restaurant employees feel like they don’t receive enough hands-on training from their managers. This, in turn, can make it difficult for staff to develop skills needed to perform tasks correctly and safely, which often leads to a loss of interest in their roles. Try providing some extra safety training over the course of the month and watch for any resulting changes in employee engagement.
 Making your food safety training sink in with your employees is as much about the “how” of your lessons as their “what.” In other words, your staff is more apt to engage with your training and remember it if you focus on the people impacted by the lessons you’re teaching – not just the nuts and bolts of safe food handling. Use case studies to reinforce the messages you’re trying to deliver. The Stop Foodborne Illness Toolkit provides a case study of a baby who contracted Salmonella, along with some discussion guides aimed at various parts of a foodservice organization. It may help you see how different groups perceive their food safety roles differently and where you may have to fill gaps in training and knowledge.
 Before cooler temperatures encourage rodents and other pests to seek shelter in your restaurant kitchen, your staff can help you make your business a less hospitable place for them. Consider the perimeter of your property: Beyond repair work being done on your building to seal cracks and close other potential entry points, incentivize your waitstaff to keep pests at bay. They can be your eyes and ears around your restaurant, ensuring your outdoor seating areas are cleaned regularly, clearing finished dishes and cutlery promptly, wiping up spills, and identifying possible infestations for you before they become larger problems.
 Restaurants that are less likely to experience foodborne illness outbreaks tend to have a couple of key traits in common, according to research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It may come as a surprise, but their study found that factors such as a restaurant’s food safety training, sick leave pay, and policies to keep sick workers from reporting to work are less connected to the frequency of outbreaks. However, restaurants with a certified kitchen manager on staff, and food safety certification training provided by a state agency, local agency, or restaurant corporation were less likely to experience outbreaks. As you work to improve your food safety record, consider how working with a certified third party could help reinforce what your staff needs to know – and also empower your kitchen managers to lead by example.
 It’s Friday night and three of your staff have called in sick. When this happens, would you ever ask the person who seems the least sick to still come in…just for a couple of hours? It can be tempting for short-staffed restaurants to make such a request, but this can have significant consequences. According to Francine Shaw and Matthew Regusci, food safety experts who host a podcast about the topic, more than 40 percent of restaurant foodborne illness outbreaks are caused by employees coming to work sick. What’s more, Shaw said only about 23 percent of restaurants have written policies in place telling employees not to come to work sick. As flu season approaches again, make sure you and your staff are clear on what symptoms should prevent them from coming to work. Some symptoms are clearer than others. Vomiting and diarrhea are among the clearer ones. But how about a sore throat, mild fever or bad cold? Make sure your policy is clear – and don’t be afraid to tell customers that their order may take a little longer because you’re short-staffed due to illness. Explain that you’re just trying to keep them safe.
 Your cutting boards can be sources of contamination if they’re not cleaned and sanitized thoroughly – and according to the material they are made from. Broadly, you need to ensure the boards are scraped free of food particles, washed with warm, soapy water, rinsed, sanitized and then dried – either with a clean cloth or air-dried. The sanitizing step differs by the material of your board. For glass, plastic and stainless steel boards, State Food Safety advises sanitizing in the dishwasher or with an FDA-approved sanitizer for food contact surfaces. Marble boards should be sanitized by hand in a chlorine solution, while wooden boards are best sanitized in a quaternary ammonium-based sanitizer.
 Bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods triggers about 30 percent of foodborne illnesses in restaurants each year, according to the CDC. In addition to following recommendations for frequent handwashing, using tongs, deli tissue or single-use gloves can provide a useful backstop protecting your restaurant’s food safety record. Just make sure staff follow proper procedures for using, cleaning, and where appropriate, discarding, these items so you can prevent cross-contamination and avoid having staff use these protections in place of regular handwashing.
 Your staff rely on food thermometers to ensure that the foods they serve are done cooking and are being held at the proper temperatures. But this requires that they’re using accurate thermometers – and dropping a thermometer or using one to measure the temperature of very hot and very cold foods in close proximity can result in faulty readings. To make sure your thermometers are accurate, calibrate them daily using a boiling-point and/or freezing-point method.
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