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. 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? Has your food preparation equipment seen better days? Even if you’re careful with cleaning and sanitizing knives, cutting boards and other food preparation surfaces, these items do degrade with time and can pose cross-contamination risks if they’re not replaced after longtime use. To help ensure your food preparation tools aren’t letting you down, create and maintain an inventory of these items – noting when they come in and when they should be replaced. Pay particular attention to any food preparation tools that can rust, chip or develop crevices that are difficult to clean thoroughly. 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. At a time when restaurants must justify every expense, cutting corners can seem unavoidable – especially in areas your guests don’t see or appreciate. Food safety can be one such area – after all, guests are less likely to compliment a safe dining experience than complain about one that makes them ill. But consider the numbers. According to research from the National Institutes of Health, the cost of a single foodborne illness outbreak ranged from $3,968-$1.9 million for a quick-service restaurant, $6,330-$2.1 million for a fast-casual restaurant, $8,030-$2.2 million for a casual-dining restaurant, and $8,273-$2.6 million for a fine-dining restaurant. On the lower end, they considered the likely expenses generated by a five-person outbreak with no lost revenue, lawsuits, legal fees or fines. On the higher end, they considered a 250-person outbreak, with 100 meals lost per illness, as well as high legal fees and fines. Talk to Team Four if you’d like to find out how to get more from your food safety program. |
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