 Does your restaurant’s food safety culture run deep – or could it easily become watered down with the departure of certain staff who reinforce it? If you can bring greater standardization to your food safety processes, both within a facility and across your locations if you operate more than one, this will go a long way in helping you ensure the consistency you need to weave food safety into the fabric of your business. Consider all of your food safety processes. Are any of them unnecessarily complex – or applied slightly differently in one location than another? How can you make each process simpler, easier to follow, and applied in a standard way across your organization?
 At a time when your restaurant may be using more heaters, both indoors and outdoors, to make your spaces more comfortable and accessible regardless of the weather, it’s important to give your equipment and staff a fire safety check-up. The risk of fire increases in the winter months – and some of the newer or temporary structures you may be heating can present an additional risk to your restaurant if heaters aren’t used properly. In addition to maintaining indoor appliances that can pose fire safety hazards, like your vent hood, now is a good time to deliver updated fire safety training to your staff and make sure your fire extinguishers are in good working order.
 Cross-contamination can happen easily in a busy restaurant kitchen with staff juggling a variety of food preparation tasks. Making it as easy as possible to keep certain foods – particularly raw meat, seafood, poultry and eggs – separate from other foods can help minimize safety risks. That includes having separate containers for these foods when shopping for them/collecting them, having dedicated space on the lowest shelf of the refrigerator for storing the foods (and enclosing them in sealed containers), and using a separate, color-coded cutting board when preparing these foods for cooking. Reinforcing with staff that they must avoid washing these foods is important too, since the splatters can spread germs around the kitchen.
 Food safety training is never one-and-done, but you don’t want to have to review content because the same mistakes happen repeatedly. Food safety and training expert Brita Ball advises operators to consider the purpose of their training, including what they want staff to think, feel and do as a result of it. For example, a senior manager focused on the impact of food safety on the business may respond to a case study about the consequences of a food safety mistake, while a frontline employee may respond better to quick, inspiring lessons delivered in pre-shift team huddles over the course of several weeks or months. Then make the reinforcement of each lesson easy and positive – through signage and other prompts in your facility, consistent results tracking, and positive reinforcement through rewards.
 Like most restaurant tasks these days, the hazards in and around your kitchen can be digitally monitored and managed. If you’re struggling with staff absence due to injury – especially on a repeated basis – it may benefit you to collect data that can tell a story about what needs to change. As a recent QSR Magazine report explains, health care management software can help an operator track how much time someone spends on dangerous or unhealthy tasks. It can also compile information that feeds into reports on dangerous situations and help an operator identify trends that could harm staff and, by extension, the business.
 About 60 percent of all foodborne disease outbreaks in the U.S. are caused by foodservice establishments. To change that figure in a more positive direction, restaurants might take some cues from robust food safety processes required elsewhere. While a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan is mandatory for many food production facilities, it is voluntary for restaurants – but a Process HACCP plan is tailored to foodservice businesses and could be helpful to establishments struggling with food safety. As a recent Food Safety Magazine report explains, a Process HACCP plan helps define the flow of food preparation in a kitchen for all products, much like the flow of food in a manufacturing facility production line. It includes every recipe from the stage of sourcing ingredients through receiving, storing, preparing and serving them, offering the opportunity to identify and prevent potential hazards at each step – before they become sources of foodborne illness for guests.
 As you prepare for an uptick in traffic over the holiday season, you’re likely stretching your imagination with new menu items and promotions that will make the occasion feel special. At a time when labor will continue to be uncertain, ensure that your food safety standards aren’t stretched to accommodate your plans. Consider slimming down various parts of your operation – to include your menu and aspects of your service model – to either eliminate or bring greater efficiency to your most labor-intensive tasks. Scrutinize each menu item to make sure you’re maximizing profit, minimizing the labor hours required to prepare and serve it, and opting for the plan that you’re best able to execute with minimal staff. It may require you to forgo offerings that have been popular in the past, but preserving food safety even if you have a skeleton crew can help you ensure the experience you’re providing is one of quality.
 As Thanksgiving and the holiday season approach – and consumption of turkey and other poultry climbs – give your team a primer on safe preparation. Salmonella is among the top causes of food poisoning in the U.S., leading to about 26,500 hospitalisations and 420 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chicken and turkey are responsible for about 20 percent of Salmonella infections, the most of any food category. As you anticipate serving up this season’s poultry, remember to separate poultry from raw and ready-to-eat foods. Thaw poultry safely – not out on the counter – and avoid keeping it at room temperature for more than two hours. Wash hands thoroughly and disinfect surfaces nearby, but don’t wash the poultry itself – it spreads bacteria around the sink and nearby surfaces. If you need to remove anything from the skin, use a paper towel to do so. Cook to 165°F, as measured with the thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh.
 Your staff’s time is precious. When it comes to food safety, you want to be able to make the most of the time they put into it. It can help to deliver content in a mix of contexts – through classroom-style instruction and on-the-job training – and ensure the training material is best suited to those contexts. As The Rail reports, theoretical training – such as HACCP training or any training that needs to happen over an extended period – is best saved for the classroom. Brief demos of cleaning tasks or temperature measurement are best retained when presented on the job, where staff can observe the task in the context of their shift. Looking at your current training program, is the content delivered in the way it’s most likely to be absorbed and retained?
 A Gallup poll found that as of last year, engaged, enthusiastic employees comprised about 30-35 percent of the workforce, while disengaged employees comprised about 15 percent. That left 50-55 percent of employees feeling indifferent to their jobs. In other words, the majority of employees felt so-so, at best, about their work. In foodservice, that means that employees’ attention to doing their jobs well, including maintaining safety standards, is likely suffering as a result. A Food Safety Magazine report advises foodservice operators to first focus on employee well-being before more tactical training when building a food safety culture. That involves asking whether staff have a manageable workload, with sufficient time away to recharge. It also requires operators to find ways to make work meaningful – to demonstrate why even seemingly mundane food safety tasks matter. Finally, in cases where results aren’t where they need to be, the team needs to be led differently, with new approaches that invite them to tap into new skills or improve existing ones.
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