|
Food safety is a moving target. In addition to the growing list of guest dietary requirements foodservice businesses monitor, even changes in staff and shifts can leave room for an oversight that creates a problem. The stakes are especially high in senior living facilities, where weakened immune systems and health challenges leave people more vulnerable.
Fortunately, a wide array of technology is being used to monitor safety in foodservice businesses – wireless sensors for remote monitoring, Bluetooth thermometers, and smart dishwashing machines that automatically log sanitation temperatures and chemical levels are just a few examples. These tools are useful in removing error-prone manual processes and human biases, but they aren’t immune to failure, or a replacement for human knowledge. Yet it’s easy for technology to become a crutch during busy or understaffed shifts. Taking a few steps can help you strike the right balance between tech-driven accuracy and human oversight. Starting small – say, by automating a single critical control point like cold storage monitoring before expanding to other areas – can help your team adapt to a new tool and pick up on potential issues with it. Of course, ongoing staff training on tech additions is needed to maximize their benefits and maintain compliance. Finally, scheduling periodic reviews of digital records can ensure you’re verifying the accuracy of the tools you implement so you can address any discrepancies promptly. The rise of automation in restaurants has promised benefits including greater efficiency, consistency and revenue. (For example, a recent report about Sweetgreen’s first robotic Infinite Kitchen say the location has delivered restaurant-level margins of 31 percent, a 45 percent reduction in employee turnover, and a ten percent increase in check sizes.) As the minimum wage increases and restaurants continue to face other pressures, the drive for automation will only continue. But is food safety keeping up? Food safety expert Francine Shaw expressed some doubts in a recent podcast. She relayed how she had been asked to review the policies and procedures of a restaurant that was already operating automated restaurants in a number of states. But they lacked a HACCP plan and had no food safety management or personal hygiene plan of any kind. She made recommendations to this business but they decided not to follow them because of the expense. Such examples raise concerns: When the machines supporting a foodservice operation need to be broken down and cleaned every few hours, will the staff be trained and available to do that? Will the business be able to demonstrate to their insurer that automation is resulting in stronger food safety results? Food safety won’t be an automatic result of automation — it will require a plan that keeps pace with the advancement in other parts of a business. A recent Food Safety Magazine report encourages organizations to think of sanitation as resting on a three-legged stool. People, training programs, and hygienic design and maintenance represent the three legs – and when one or more legs is compromised, it brings down the others. If you have a safety failure, scrutinize each of these legs of the stool to find the root cause. Do you have sufficient people on hand to complete the tasks required? Do they understand what they need to accomplish and when? Is your equipment able to be cleaned easily and does your staff have the appropriate tools and cleaning materials they need? You may see patterns emerging that can help you zero in on your biggest risks. 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. |
subscribe to our newsletterArchives
February 2026
Categories
All
|



RSS Feed