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. It doesn’t matter how delicious your food is: If a guest finds a stray hair in their meal, they’re done – and unlikely to return. Beyond the grossness factor, hair can carry pathogens like Staphylococcus bacteria. When training your staff, ensure that any long or face-framing hair is securely pinned back with a tie and/or hat and that facial hair is kept closely shaved or in a net. It’s not simply about keeping long hair from flowing freely – it’s also about preventing it from being a distraction so a person won’t absentmindedly sweep hair away from their face and bring it onto a food surface. Your soft drinks may be in even greater demand than your food options on hot summer days. But a less-than-clean soda fountain can be an immediate turn-off for guests (not to mention a safety hazard). It’s easy for mildew to collect around soda fountain spouts that aren’t cleaned regularly. What’s more, if you’re allowing guests to serve drinks themselves in an effort to save labor, your staff will need to take care to inspect and clean these machines more often. Do your safety checks ensure that your machines are cleaned in the appropriate ways – and at the right intervals – so they’re serving up a clean pour? Have your guests shared a food safety concern about your restaurant in an online review? Your response – or lack thereof – can send a loud message to guests about the quality of your food and your commitment to food safety. If you leave several negative reviews unanswered, you may send the message that you don’t care about improving, that you hear this kind of thing so often that it isn’t alarming anymore, or that you’re not interested in making the effort to make things right for your guests. Your negative reviews have power for the bad and for the good. Make sure that you use yours to strengthen guest relationships by showing concern for making a situation better. While you want the tantalizing smells of your grill to waft out onto the street and draw people in, any mysterious smells coming from your kitchen are far less desirable and could signal a lurking food safety issue. Certain odors that seem a bit off – fishy smells, sewage smells or mustiness, for example – could indicate spoiling or rancid ingredients, poor drainage or a pest infestation. If your kitchen or guest-facing areas don’t pass the smell test, take a closer look at what potential food safety issues may be hiding under the surface. |
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