The festivity and stress of the holiday season can result in greater consumption of alcohol by your guests – even among those who normally abstain. It may be helpful to review your state’s alcohol liability with your staff. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 30 states have laws allowing restaurants, bars, and other businesses to be held liable for selling or serving alcohol to people who cause injury or death because of their intoxication. It’s important to have your staff check IDs and to train workers about how to respond when customers are clearly intoxicated. Food safety can sometimes feel like a thankless task – guests are more likely to speak up about a poor food safety experience than a great one. But that isn’t always the case. (And sharing some strong examples of food safety may help others in the business.) Earlier this year, the food safety consultancy Steritech recognized Chipotle with the 2023 Excellence in Food Safety Award – with MOD Pizza and Five Guys earning honorable mentions. Specifically, Chipotle stood out for its multi-tiered approach to food safety. That includes a focus on each link of the supply chain, from how their food is raised through every employee level to ensure safe handling and preparation. Internally, the restaurant has a Food Safety Advisory Council, a dedicated food safety section on its website and the brand invests in local and small business suppliers to help meet its food safety standards. 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? Improve your fire safety Research from the National Fire Protection Association found that U.S. fire departments respond to an average of 20 fires per day at restaurants and bars. Fire hazards can increase if your equipment isn’t sufficiently cleaned and maintained – tasks that can slip through the cracks when a restaurant is short-staffed. Make sure fire safety procedures are part of your staff training, so your employees know where to find fire extinguishers, how to keep their work areas clean and free from fire hazards, what ingredients and cooking methods pose the greatest risks, and how to safely exit the premises in case of fire. Conduct regular inspections of your gas and electrical power supplies, and ensure your fire alarms and sprinklers are in working order. Considering that an estimated 33 million Americans have food allergies – including one in 13 children under age 18 – it would be understandable for a restaurant to shy away from serving allergic guests. But there are some restaurant operators doing the opposite and seeing real opportunity in being a trusted source of food. Dominic Jones, CEO of JPRestaurants, is among them – and it started when his child was diagnosed with a peanut allergy, according to a recent article from New Food Magazine. In the years since, his restaurant has shifted from warning allergy sufferers to welcoming them, increased the transparency of their supply chain, developed a dedicated allergy menu that eliminates the major allergens, and launched ongoing efforts to make their supply chain, recipes and front- and back-of-house processes safer for guests with allergies. (They share these efforts in a Food Allergy Approach page on their restaurant’s website.) Jones says these actions have generated revenue growth and increased guest loyalty, in addition to improving their food quality overall. Injuries involving slips, trips and falls are common in restaurants – and they can result in lost productivity as well as fines and other significant expenses. Wet or greasy floors that aren’t cleaned up promptly, wet weather conditions and poor lighting can elevate the risks around your restaurant. Before winter weather sets in, it’s a good time to walk through your facility and identify areas that may pose risks. Check for sufficient lighting in walkways, areas of uneven flooring or poor traction, and obstacles or tripping hazards in high-traffic areas inside and out. As the holiday season draws bigger crowds to restaurants, the energy in restaurant kitchens can become more frenetic and you need your team to be in top form. It may be a good time to ensure your staff has a good handle on using kitchen tools safely. Knives, slicers and other machinery with sharp blades pose hazards, especially if your staff is new, inexperienced and feels pressure to prepare food quickly. Your training should ensure that your staff knows how to keep kitchen tools in good condition, which tools to use for various tasks, how to handle and operate them correctly, and how to clean them safely. 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. The connection is clear: In Steritech’s assessment of thousands of food safety inspection results across quick-service, fast-casual and casual restaurants this year, the restaurants struggling with safety violations often have training issues. More than budget and labor challenges, inadequate or improper training is likely to cause these violations. But consider this good news – or at least an indication of a problem within your control. In your training program, are you prioritizing your biggest areas of risk, not weighing staff down with less-important facts? Are you focusing on the “why” behind your training so staff can easily make the connection between their work and protecting people’s health? Is there common sense behind each lesson so your team understands the context around the training? Does your training account for different learning needs and styles? Have you made your expectations clear? Are you taking steps to make your training engaging and motivating for staff? Build in checkpoints and rewards based on performance – and look for other ways to evolve your training based on what’s working well and what’s not. |
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