![]() Food allergies affect nearly 11 percent of adults and 8 percent of children, sending 200,000 people to the hospital in the U.S. each year. As a result, chances are good that every day, you’re having to respond to guest questions and concerns about allergens in your menu items. Being able to do this during busy shifts, smoothly and without creating bottlenecks, requires tools that allow your staff to have access to allergen information at their fingertips so they can steer guests toward foods that are safer for them. As a recent report from Modern Restaurant Management explains, restaurants can accomplish this with an up-to-date POS that is connected with their kitchen and can show real-time information about food allergens based on the menu items being offered in that moment. Combine this with payment technologies that allow the guest to input information about their allergies up front, thereby immediately omitting any menu items that could be problematic for them, and restaurants can significantly reduce their potential “points of failure” around food allergies. Doing so isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s also good for business, considering that food allergy sufferers are a loyal group. When you can provide a meal that is safe and enjoyable for a guest, they are apt to favor your restaurant in the future and recommend it to others who struggle with allergies as well. ![]() That may not necessarily be the case. Food safety regulators often have stories about finding health and safety hazards in restaurants known for having strong safety cultures. Food safety consultant Francine Shaw experienced one recently while visiting a restaurant brand known for its food safety: She used the restroom and found that the sink wasn’t working, then reported it to an employee who shrugged in response. Unfortunately, all it takes is one understaffed store, or one employee who doesn’t take their responsibility to protecting safety seriously, to threaten the safety record of a business. So what can operators do? Developing and maintaining a culture committed to safety is a process that starts at the top of the business, trickles down to all employees and needs ongoing reinforcement. It helps to develop and benchmark training programs that can keep track of training progress and areas for improvement. Understand what tools and people the team needs to protect safety. (Technology can be a useful aid here but it shouldn’t be a crutch or a replacement for knowing how to protect the safety of the business.) Adopt the mindset of a regulator when assessing your food safety standards. Where might there be pitfalls that could threaten your safety record? ![]() 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. ![]() In a recent podcast with Food Safety Magazine, food safety expert Francine Shaw said she has pulled up to restaurant drive-thrus and received food from employees wearing cleaning gloves, as well as seen restaurant staff push trash down into a bin with a gloved hand. It may sound disgusting, but it’s also understandable: If these restaurant employees had been using their bare hands, they probably would have realized they were putting food safety at risk, or at least experienced a major “ick” factor that reminded them to wash their hands. But gloves can give a person a false sense of security, as well as create a sensory barrier that makes it easier to overlook a food safety risk. Looking at your business, how well does your team follow protocols around handwashing and gloves? Do they ensure their hands are clean when they put on a new pair? Do you see people wearing multiple pairs at once? Do they understand that the gloves are there to protect guests and not the wearer? It may be helpful to review your training protocols around gloves so that they can best support your food safety and not bring new risks into it. A refresher could be especially important if you’re serving more food offsite this summer and employees’ access to handwashing sinks looks different than it does on your premises. ![]() If your restaurant is slipping up on food safety – or simply has areas where it can perform even better – it’s possible your team may not necessarily see the connection between what they do each day and the impacts on the health and safety of your guests. This isn’t just about the people preparing your food. It’s about people at every level of your organization who play a role in delivering the best possible experience for guests – even if they don’t know it. For example, the complex tasks your kitchen has to complete tend to carry greater risk. They’re more difficult to get right. Making these tasks simpler and easier may require looking at them in a different way. Your connections and partnerships with other parts of your operation can be helpful here in making positive changes. Involving partners from the beginning and as a regular part of the job can make them more invested in food safety as foundational to the overall success of the business – not something that is layered on top as extra information that needs to be learned and applied by a select group. In a recent webinar from Food Safety Magazine, Steven Lyon, director of food safety at Chick-fil-A, shared an example of how such connections can be helpful: He said that Chick-fil-A is the world’s No. 2 buyer of lemons, after Walmart. Team members used to hand-squeeze every lemon, handling 50 cases of lemons a day – not a great experience for team members and a burden on operational storage space. But the team came up with the idea of transitioning to high-pressure-process lemon juice to ease those strains – and over the course of a multi-year period, they were able to get buy-in across the business about the value of the change. Where might your business benefit – in safety, costs savings or other areas – from gathering the input and buy-in of people across your operation? ![]() The FDA is considering cutting funding for state food inspections, which currently total about 5,700 – a large portion of the country’s food safety audits. This comes at a time when foodborne illness outbreaks are an ongoing threat. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 12 multi-state outbreaks in the U.S. in 2022, nine in 2023, and four in the first four months of 2024. Third-party inspections can and do help businesses identify risks and make corrections before they balloon into larger problems. In the meantime, foodservice operations may have to take some steps on their own to manage their role in protecting against foodborne illness, including shrinking and closely managing the food supply chain and securing relationships with suppliers who are committed to protecting food safety and have systems in place to identify risks and alert businesses to them in real time. ![]() In the U.S., there are hundreds of millions of gloves used every day in medical and food settings. When people wear them, they are taking an action intended to protect the safety of their task. But what if this assumption of safety is misplaced? In a recent podcast promoted by Food Safety Magazine, food safety experts Francine Shaw and Matt Regusci interviewed Steve Ardagh, the CEO and Founder of Eagle Protect, about how regulations governing glove safety haven’t caught up with reality. Ardagh said FDA food compliance as it relates to gloves only focuses on chemical migration – not whether the gloves are actually clean or intact out of the box. Five years ago, Ardagh began working with the microbiologist Barry Michaels, who has researched glove and hand cleanliness extensively, to test the safety of gloves coming into the U.S. market. He said tests of 2800 gloves from 26 brands of medical and food-compliant gloves found that more than 50 percent of test samples had indicators of fecal matter, as well as 260 additional pathogens including E. coli, salmonella and listeria. Subsequently, they developed a test process to make sure the gloves reaching the U.S. have a good standard of cleanliness. It’s troubling news and underlines the importance of personal hygiene – and not relying on other products as a first line of defense when it comes to protecting food safety. ![]() Even if your staff is careful about cleaning and sanitizing food preparation surfaces, poor personal hygiene can drag down your restaurant’s food safety – or at least your guests’ perception of it. Transferring pathogens from one’s body – particularly hands – to food is the leading cause of foodborne-illness outbreaks at restaurants, according to the National Restaurant Association. Neglecting personal hygiene significantly increases the chances of transferring harmful pathogens onto food. Soiled uniforms, long hair that isn’t tied back away from the face, untrimmed nails, perspiration and jewelry can all contribute to the problem. Does your employee policy adequately cover personal hygiene practices? Consider fine-tuning standards around laundering uniforms before a shift, where to store soiled items so they don’t come into contact with food, how to keep long hair away from food, what jewelry is acceptable to wear while working, and where personal items should be stored during a shift. Break times that give staff an opportunity to refuel can also help ensure your team members present themselves well in front of guests – particularly in hot weather. Just make sure that any food or drink they consume is kept away from food preparation areas and equipment. And of course, reinforcing frequent and thorough handwashing practices throughout a shift and after breaks is probably the most important thing you can do to support your food safety each day. ![]() Despite the rise in real-time, tech-based controls designed to help businesses monitor foodborne illness risks, outbreaks continue to be an issue for foodservice operations. The CDC recorded 519 norovirus outbreaks between August 2023 and January of this year, a sharp rise from the previous year’s numbers, and Salmonella has impacted people across 32 states in recent months. On top of food safety technology that helps foodservice operations monitor protocols and stay alert to problems, old-fashioned food safety practices are just as important. A Food Safety Tech report says this should include thorough, frequent handwashing; proper hand hygiene prior to handling food; and the use of alcohol-based sanitizer as an added precaution – not a substitute – for handwashing. It’s also important to clean and sanitize high-touch surfaces and equipment regularly – and wash and sanitize produce to eliminate contaminants (the recent Salmonella outbreak was linked to cantaloupe and pre-cut fruit products). The report also advises careful handling and proper cooking of seafood, particularly shellfish, and having an employee policy with clear guidelines for managing staff illness, especially regarding when it’s important to avoid handling food or reporting to work. ![]() 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. |
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