 In a restaurant, a food safety issue can snowball quickly into a health and public relations concern. Your employee training can help contain the issue. If and when a guest alerts your staff to a food safety issue, do you trust that your staff communicates in a way that protects customers and maintains trust?
Your staff can manage a reported food safety concern by acknowledging the incident and apologizing without getting defensive. They can record what the guest ate and when, as well as any symptoms they experienced, then agreeing to investigate the cause and follow up with them. From there, your team can review the preparation process of the suspected dish, checking storage, cooking, and serving practices to ensure proper hygiene and temperature control. Inspect the ingredients for signs of spoilage or contamination and verify supplier records. Investigate risks of cross-contamination, such as improper handling of raw and ready-to-eat foods. Were cleaning protocols followed for utensils and surfaces? Examine staff hygiene practices, equipment cleanliness, and the overall kitchen environment for lapses. Review food safety records, including temperature logs and cleaning schedules. If you suspect foodborne illness, notify health authorities and cooperate fully. Finally, take corrective actions, such as enhancing staff training or updating procedures, and follow up with the guest to provide transparency and reassurance.  At a time of year when seasonal illnesses run rampant, foodservice operations must manage a difficult balancing act: When an employee feels unwell, should they come to work – or take time away from a busy shift to recover? If you’re like most foodservice businesses, you have a written employee health policy that helps guide your operation’s management of staff wellness. But that doesn’t mean it’s doing its job. According to a recent study by the International Association for Food Protection, over 98 percent of foodservice businesses surveyed have a written employee health policy. Yet when it comes to demonstrating accountability for and awareness of that policy, the numbers drop dramatically. For example, only 9 percent of respondents said they had a wellness check before a shift and 7.5 percent said their policy was reinforced by management. If this sounds familiar, consider how your operation compares to the restaurant brand First Watch, which was awarded the 2024 Food Safety Excellence Award from Steritech. Winners of this award must demonstrate their food safety performance against seven pillars: leadership, communication, standards, training, scorecard, oversight and recognition. In a recent webinar from Steritech and the National Restaurant Association, First Watch food safety leaders explained that their employee wellness policy is something that all staff must read and agree to. From there, the restaurant uses the third-party service Zero Hour Health to manage their health program. All employees are trained that when they feel ill, they have to report to their manager and complete an electronic survey about their health symptoms. Nurses and health representatives from Zero Hour Health review the responses and provide clear feedback (in the form of a green check or a red X) indicating whether it’s okay to return to work and when. Looking at your own operation, do you see opportunity to remove any food safety risks related to employee wellness?
 Food safety is having a consumer confidence crisis. According to a recent Gallup poll, 42 percent of Americans have little to no confidence in the government’s ability to keep food safe. It’s easy to understand why: In 2019, the government issued 330 food recalls. In just the first six months of 2024, there were 578 – and they often generate news headlines. In the current economic environment, foodservice operations must not only entice consumers to spend money on meals away from home, but they must also take extra precautions to demonstrate that the food they serve is safe.
As you prepare to start the New Year, is there room to improve your operation’s approach to food safety? Much of it comes down to culture – that includes making a top-down, daily commitment to food safety, encouraging all employees to take ownership of it, helping staff understand the “why” behind safety precautions and connecting the why to specific tasks, and discussing food safety as a means of improving business (not as a tick-the-box exercise). On that note, consider food safety records to be your friend: They can help you prevent repeating tasks, ensure tasks are carried out correctly and consistently, and improve traceability in case of a recall. What’s more, careful recordkeeping can save you time in the event of a food safety violation by helping you demonstrate that a compliance problem was an isolated incident – not a widespread problem requiring time-consuming investigation. Bringing in a consultant can help you show your commitment to food safety in your operation, as well as reinforce the connection between the potential consequences of a food safety problem and the specific actions needed to prevent one. Contact Team Four if you need a food safety tune-up in the New Year.  September is National Food Safety Education Month, so it’s a natural time to weave some employee training, games, competitions, rewards and other team engagement activities into your routine. Consider your operation’s bottlenecks, weak points, or other areas that can suffer when you’re short- staffed. Where could your team’s knowledge be improved incrementally this month so you’re in a stronger position to approach the challenges of flu season and the holidays? If you’re looking for some guidance or prepackaged training materials, the FDA and National Restaurant Association offer a range of free resources to share with staff that you might also use as the basis of contests. If you’re proud of your food safety record to date, National Food Safety Education Month is also an opportunity to share your wins with guests — or simply your commitment to keeping them safe. Even a few years post-pandemic, consumers continue to perceive safety as a key pillar of your hospitality.
 A food safety culture tends to generate the best engagement when business leaders are committed to it and weave it into their everyday actions and conversations. But what if your business is in the position of having to persuade senior management of the importance of investing more in its food safety culture? It takes some managing up. But if you approach leaders strategically, you can demonstrate how it’s in their best interest to support and promote food safety as a business value instead of simply a requirement. In a recent podcast for Food Safety Magazine, Nuno Soares, food safety consultant, trainer and author of the new book How to Sell Food Safety: 3-1/2 Steps to Increase Your Chances of Being Heard, spoke about how he advises food safety workers to approach business leaders. Approach it with an understanding of what motivates the leader. Will they do anything to avoid a financial loss? Are they more motivated by the promise of a better future and are willing to take risks along the way to get it? Provide some data to reinforce the potential direct and indirect consequences of doing nothing. What is the potential impact on sales, costs, penalties, employee morale and talent retention? Soares recommends starting the meeting by stating the problem you’re facing, then explaining the stakes. Follow that with a broad plan you’d like to use to generate the positive outcomes you have in mind (and how you can minimize the potential negative ones). Finally, make sure there is a clear call to action at the end – like an agreement, a next meeting on the calendar, or information about the target budget – anything to overcome the likelihood of a delay in proceeding.
 The restaurant business can be difficult to predict: A sick employee, a piece of key equipment in disrepair, or weather conditions that result in a long line out your door can quickly turn a seemingly routine day into a unmanageable one. When this happens, it’s only natural to switch into a different gear where you’re putting out fires – taking on some extra tasks here or skipping some safety checks there just to keep up with what’s happening in the moment. But this can cause a ripple effect that’s difficult to reverse. Specifically, what happens to your procedures when conditions settle down and your operation seems to be flowing as it should? Junior members of the team who have observed the restaurant in fire-fighting mode now know there are some tasks that can be skipped if need be. So do they really need to be done as regularly as they were initially told? Being in fire-fighting mode on a regular basis can erode your management’s credibility and lead to a decline in food safety. To stop repeating the pattern, it can help to take a step back and assess how often you’re short on staff, having audits or inspections, or otherwise having to scramble to dig yourself out of challenging situations. Understand where you’re slipping so you can build a backup plan to ensure you’re still upholding your food safety procedures, identify tools or automations that might support you, and ask for help from your team and upper management.
 If your business is struggling with hiring and retaining staff, it may also be struggling to carry out food safety training – or to review any processes that don’t directly support your compliance with local and state regulations. But unfortunately, a restaurant may suffer for this in the long term if employees are injured on the job or if the business faces a steep insurance claim that could have been prevented by having a strong safety culture. Your restaurant’s commitment to safety should be so woven through its fabric that senior leaders talk about it regularly and every new hire is aware of your approach before they even start their job. To make it easier to share safety knowledge and encourage retention, automate what you can – through the use of video training, gamification and digital tools that guide staff through preparation tasks that protect safety. Then take steps to broaden the knowledge of your team through regular cross-training to help fill gaps. Give your more senior staff mentoring roles with newer staff. Above all, explain the why behind why you perform certain safety practices so that tasks are less likely to fall through the cracks as you manage the other demands of your business.
 When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) led a study investigating the various factors that contribute to the cross-contamination of food in restaurants, they found more frequent cases of contamination in businesses that were lacking food safety training and certification, as well as those without handwashing policies. Contamination risks were present in restaurants that didn’t require manager certification or train workers in food safety, for example. As for handwashing, the risk for contamination was greatest in restaurants that didn’t have policies detailing where, when and how often to wash hands, or on the need to minimize bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods. Unfortunately, 60 percent of the foodborne illness outbreaks reported to the CDC each year connect back to restaurants, so it’s worth zeroing in on these areas if improving food safety is on your list of priorities this year. Having a staff discussion about handwashing is something a restaurant manager can do right away to help lower a restaurant’s risks – particularly at a time when seasonal viruses are common.
 Enhance your risk management culture
Taking a more proactive approach to risk management in your business can save you significant money and time in the long run – helping you avoid costly insurance claims, repeat safety inspections, business interruptions and other drains on resources that you’d rather direct to improving your overall operation. Could risk management be woven into your culture more tightly this year? It can help to look across your operation to assess risks as diverse as your potential for equipment problems, food safety concerns and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Connect your risks to daily tasks that help you identify and respond to problems. Assess where staff training is needed to reinforce the actions your business needs to take to manage these issues day to day. Then make it possible to track these actions – by tying each task to a person on staff and using automated dashboards and checklists that make it easy to monitor when jobs are completed and missed. To manage evolving risks to cybersecurity, conduct regular testing with the help of your vendor, limit system access to key personnel, and ensure you’re using protections such as multifactor authentication and encryption as additional data safeguards.  Making food safety lessons stick
When you think back on the best teachers you had when you were in school, they most likely weren’t the ones who talked at you during class, expecting you to soak up everything they said or assigned homework. Yet this is how food safety training goes in many organizations. Making these lessons take hold in the minds of employees calls for a different approach. In a recent podcast discussion, Adam Spach (founder of KAS Concepts, the home of No Boring Training) and food safety experts Matthew Regusci and Francine Shaw covered what tends to make food safety training sessions more effective in getting through to participants. Of course, it’s important to teach people the right steps to take to protect safety – but just as important are the why and the how behind the actions. For example, why is it important to take the temperature of a food? Well, a person could end up in the hospital if they eat food that hasn’t been thoroughly cooked. The restaurant could even go out of business. To illustrate this, you can share some real-life examples of when this has happened for restaurants. Attaching specific stories to lessons can help them sink in – there are plenty of them available on sites such as stopfoodborneillness.org. Shaw also suggested adjusting how content is shared, encouraging the use of mnemonic devices to help people make associations to food safety knowledge. For example, you might help people remember that poultry needs to be cooked to the highest temperature as compared to other animal proteins by saying that “birds fly high.” Above all, it’s important to make food safety training feel less like a lesson and more like a conversation. It helps to encourage food safety discussion not only in classroom settings, but also in team huddles and one-on-one meetings. This can also encourage people to share their own examples of things they have seen on the job that may serve as learning opportunities for others. |
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