 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.
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