Data from Travelers insurance company found that first-year employees are at greatest risk of workplace injuries – and the restaurant industry generates the most insurance claims from first-year employees than any other industry. The research indicates that more than half of restaurant claims involved their newest workers and represented 47 percent of total claim costs. The most common causes of these injuries were overexertion, along with slips, trips and falls. With that in mind, how might you enhance your training to help new staff avoid these hazards? Showing your team how to avoid injuries that result from simple overexertion can be an easy win. Do your newest team members know how to safely carry and move loads of any size, as well as how to move through the restaurant in ways that don’t cause unnecessary strain and can lead to injury? In a recent webinar about the return on investment of food safety programs, leaders from Steritech shared some telling research from the USDA. The research emphasized how important it is to not only have a strong food safety program, but also to combine it with managers who can discuss it knowledgeably. Specifically, it found that quick-service restaurants that lacked this combination generated 4.7 high-risk violations on average per inspection, compared to 1.7 violations for those that had a strong program and knowledgeable managers. Making this connection turned out to be a strong predictor of food safety success in these restaurants. If your food safety is lagging in certain areas, could it help to connect the dots between your program and the managers in charge of overseeing it? Approximately 48 million people in the U.S. – roughly one in six people – get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The financial impact following a single foodborne illness outbreak associated with a restaurant can run into the millions of dollars, not to mention the threats it poses to people’s lives. While these outbreaks are a significant problem, the good news is that they are largely preventable. As seasonal illnesses ramp up, do you feel your staff is focusing in the correct areas to limit the spread of infection? Prioritize the targets with the biggest protective potential – such as thorough handwashing on the job and labor scheduling to help ensure backup if and when staff are ill this winter. Your training can reinforce the “why” behind these precautions. You may have separate preparation areas and tools for foods containing allergens, a staff that can name the big eight allergens that trigger the most problems for people, and clear warnings on your menu encouraging guests to alert staff about allergens. But you can still slip up with an allergic guest if communication from the guest to the server to the kitchen and back isn’t clear. In fact, this triggered a severe allergy for a 12-year-old boy in Massachusetts several years ago. Due to a misunderstanding by restaurant staff, the boy was served a pastry filled with peanut butter despite having told the server of his peanut allergy. The boy’s mother had an EpiPen on hand – otherwise the allergy could have been fatal. Now, the family is working to advance legislation that would update food allergy training materials and require restaurants in the state to always be staffed with someone who has used the updated materials. What safety mechanisms do you have in place – tech-based or not – to make sure your staff communicates clearly with guests and each other about allergies? Food safety can be an especially pressing problem at breakfast. That’s according to data that food safety consultancy Steritech collected from tens of thousands of food safety assessments from quick-service, fast-casual and casual restaurants in the first seven months of this year. Across these restaurant categories, the breakfast daypart generated a significantly higher number of food safety violations than lunch and dinner combined. Does this hold true for your restaurant? If so, can you identify how you might navigate around the root causes behind safety issues early in the day? Talk to Team Four if you need guidance on how to best uphold food safety standards amid budget constraints, labor challenges or training shortfalls. Your waste management and food safety practices go hand in hand: If you have too much excess stock, you run the risk of serving ingredients that are past expiration. At the very least, this may give your guests a less-than-great dining experience with you, but at worst, you may expose guests to a foodborne illness caused by spoiled or expired ingredients. By keeping a close watch on your stock and using automated tools to monitor it, you’re better able to plan in advance to ensure your restaurant is preparing and serving foods while they are still fresh. In the process, you’ll be offering guests a safer dish. A recent Restaurant News report details how Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices can help restaurant kitchens gather data on temperature, humidity, light exposure and other conditions that can impact food quality. Are you using these tools to optimize your inventory management and minimize waste? In an environment where restaurants are being extra cautious about spending, directing resources toward food safety can feel like an investment that doesn’t give back as much as it should. But as food safety experts shared during a recent webinar from the National Restaurant Association and Steritech, restaurants that are committed to food safety experience benefits such as fewer issues with guests around food quality and safety, easier inspections (and less need for reinspections and follow-up training), and better records of recruiting and retaining staff. To realize those benefits, they said, restaurants must set clear and measurable goals; collect and analyze accurate, frequent, consistent data to measure performance against goals; then report back to the organization so everyone knows what needs to be done to close the gap and what they can do to help the business reach its goals. Any goals should be SMART: Specific, measurable, action-based, realistic and time-bound. Specifically, there should be systems in place to allow you to measure what’s happening, people have to understand what steps they must take to reach their goals and have the tools they need to handle their tasks, and there should be clear, connected milestones to keep everyone on track. Looking at your own food safety program, are there gaps that this structure can help you fill and help you generate a stronger return on your investment? In an environment where so many employees are new, it can be easy for people to look to others to manage food safety tasks. But in reality, it needs to be part of everyone’s job description. Does everyone on your team take ownership of it? In a recent report in Modern Restaurant Management, food safety expert Francine Shaw advises operators to support food safety through regular evaluations, internal audits and performance reviews. Make sure your staff have feedback mechanisms to report issues too. This can help you identify problems and stop them in their tracks, prompt some (non-punitive) corrective training on the spot, and also give you an opportunity to recognize and reward staff who consistently demonstrate a commitment to protecting food safety. When your team sees that their food safety efforts are valuable – to you and to them – you’ll be able to weave them into your restaurant’s culture. Pests are looking for shelter during the cooler months and your kitchen is likely a warm, fragrant attraction for them. But you can take steps to prevent an infestation – or at least spot the early signs of one and handle it before it becomes a full-blown safety problem. In addition to having your staff check pest traps regularly, ask them to be aware of other warning signs: cardboard or other containers that look like they have been chewed, shredded paper or cardboard that rodents might use for nesting, droppings, the sounds of scratching or other possible animal activity in the walls, unusual smells, or insect activity in or around bins or food storage areas. When the food safety auditor Steritech analyzed more than 100,000 food safety assessments for quick-service, fast-casual and casual restaurants in the first seven months of this year, they uncovered some common safety challenges. Across the board, the top three restaurant violations relate to the cleanliness of nonfood-contact surfaces (like knobs, cooler handles and equipment surfaces), the condition of nonfood-contact surfaces (like cracked knife handles or rusty shelves), and general facility cleanliness (like residue on walls, ceilings and floors). Steritech says common industry challenges such as training gaps, labor shortages and budget limitations may be behind the findings. If you’ve been experiencing these challenges, review your schedule and cleaning routine to ensure these areas are being covered, and plan equipment repairs in advance to avoid injuries. |
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