 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.  The FDA’s new Food Traceability Rule is taking aim at sources of contamination to reduce the number of foodborne illnesses and deaths in the U.S. It means that food businesses from farm to table will be responsible for adhering to a standardized record-keeping process that assigns codes to potentially risky foods. Items such as eggs, leafy greens, soft cheeses and other items will carry these codes in an effort to more quickly trace these items and remove them from the supply chain in the event of contamination. On March 16th, the National Restaurant Association held a webinar about the new rule, as well as various exceptions to it and strategies to comply.
 Restaurants looking to improve or sustain their food safety records have several hurdles to clear right now: Even if the business has solid training materials and is keeping up with increased onboarding of new employees, the restaurant could still fall short on the follow-up and allow a problem to slip by simply because it was not tracked. When a food safety problem occurs in your restaurant, what corrective action is required? Who is responsible for correcting it? How will a problem be tracked to ensure progress and prevent recurrence? Documenting your food safety procedures from start to finish and clarifying how you will manage the back end of an issue can help you ensure that the steps you take early on to protect safety are supported with strong follow through and a clear set of corrective actions.
 Your food safety program can’t be static. Evolving health risks, new staff and changing employee roles all make it important for restaurants to regularly track their adherence to – and communication of – their food safety procedures. Having an understanding of how you’re performing between inspections can help you adjust your training practices and even give you an opportunity to improve employee engagement by rewarding those who uphold your best practices (not simply penalizing those responsible after a food safety incident occurs). Steritech developed a quiz to help operators get a snapshot of how they are performing when it comes to food safety. It may serve as an extra tool to help you monitor what you do well and where you have room to improve.
 As flu season dovetails with the Covid-19 delta variant in the coming months, you can expect a rise in employee illnesses and even just false alarms that nonetheless require you to exercise extra caution when serving guests. The reservations platform Resy recently announced it is offering a free way for restaurants to track employees’ proof of Covid-19 vaccination, test results and other details used to track symptoms of illness. Restaurant Business reports that Resy has partnered with Clear to offer Clear’s Health Pass technology through 2022 to restaurants using Resy.
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