As you prepare for an uptick in traffic over the holiday season, you’re likely stretching your imagination with new menu items and promotions that will make the occasion feel special. At a time when labor will continue to be uncertain, ensure that your food safety standards aren’t stretched to accommodate your plans. Consider slimming down various parts of your operation – to include your menu and aspects of your service model – to either eliminate or bring greater efficiency to your most labor-intensive tasks. Scrutinize each menu item to make sure you’re maximizing profit, minimizing the labor hours required to prepare and serve it, and opting for the plan that you’re best able to execute with minimal staff. It may require you to forgo offerings that have been popular in the past, but preserving food safety even if you have a skeleton crew can help you ensure the experience you’re providing is one of quality. As Thanksgiving and the holiday season approach – and consumption of turkey and other poultry climbs – give your team a primer on safe preparation. Salmonella is among the top causes of food poisoning in the U.S., leading to about 26,500 hospitalisations and 420 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chicken and turkey are responsible for about 20 percent of Salmonella infections, the most of any food category. As you anticipate serving up this season’s poultry, remember to separate poultry from raw and ready-to-eat foods. Thaw poultry safely – not out on the counter – and avoid keeping it at room temperature for more than two hours. Wash hands thoroughly and disinfect surfaces nearby, but don’t wash the poultry itself – it spreads bacteria around the sink and nearby surfaces. If you need to remove anything from the skin, use a paper towel to do so. Cook to 165°F, as measured with the thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh. Your staff’s time is precious. When it comes to food safety, you want to be able to make the most of the time they put into it. It can help to deliver content in a mix of contexts – through classroom-style instruction and on-the-job training – and ensure the training material is best suited to those contexts. As The Rail reports, theoretical training – such as HACCP training or any training that needs to happen over an extended period – is best saved for the classroom. Brief demos of cleaning tasks or temperature measurement are best retained when presented on the job, where staff can observe the task in the context of their shift. Looking at your current training program, is the content delivered in the way it’s most likely to be absorbed and retained? A Gallup poll found that as of last year, engaged, enthusiastic employees comprised about 30-35 percent of the workforce, while disengaged employees comprised about 15 percent. That left 50-55 percent of employees feeling indifferent to their jobs. In other words, the majority of employees felt so-so, at best, about their work. In foodservice, that means that employees’ attention to doing their jobs well, including maintaining safety standards, is likely suffering as a result. A Food Safety Magazine report advises foodservice operators to first focus on employee well-being before more tactical training when building a food safety culture. That involves asking whether staff have a manageable workload, with sufficient time away to recharge. It also requires operators to find ways to make work meaningful – to demonstrate why even seemingly mundane food safety tasks matter. Finally, in cases where results aren’t where they need to be, the team needs to be led differently, with new approaches that invite them to tap into new skills or improve existing ones. If one of your guests were to get sick after eating with you, how quickly could you identify the source of the problem and, if necessary, eliminate it from your menu? Your ability to digitally trace each ingredient on your menu back to its source – and to do so quickly – can help you contain the problem before it impacts more guests and damages your restaurant’s reputation. As you work with suppliers day to day, ensure they can provide standardized data to trace ingredients with transparency. Understand how they will track an ingredient through the system, alert you in the event of a problem, and how easily they can be reached if you have an issue. Beyond the dangers food allergies can cause to health and safety, allergic reactions can deliver unwanted publicity to restaurants – and that has been happening with greater frequency as food allergies have become more prevalent. According to the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Connection Team, the number of people with a food allergy in America has doubled in each of the last decades. Having systems to get accurate, up-to-date allergy information to your guests when they need it is more important than ever – and it can earn you a loyal following of guests who trust your brand with their health. Consider leveraging tabletop technology to provide detailed information about your menu. The full nutritional information of a dish can be accessible via a tablet and updated electronically and automatically across your locations. Receiving this information directly from the restaurant can also minimize the stress a guest may feel when a server has to check with the chef about allergy information and then relay the message back. Where are your operation’s biggest slip-ups when it comes to food safety? Improving upon them may simply be a case of making the right behaviors more visible, obvious and easy to carry out. Wherever possible, bring food safety tasks out into the open, so everyone on staff can see others doing them – or be forced to ask if they are in doubt about what they need to do. It creates some positive peer pressure to replicate those efforts across the team. Line up your stations in the order in which tasks should be completed so your team doesn’t have to think about what comes next – ensure the next step is right in front of them. Food safety is not a one-and-done exercise but something that requires ongoing reinforcement. That can feel like a chore if your team finds the training repetitive, or if they believe some of the more meticulous aspects of food safety regulation are overkill. Get beyond this resistance by explaining the why – and the personal stories – behind the tasks and training you assign. Why do the current regulations exist? What problems can they prevent? Consult food safety trainers for a list of concrete examples of when food safety protocols failed – and how small mistakes in following protocol can become substantial problems. Does it actually reflect the team you currently have and the functions it serves? In a recent food safety webinar for foodservice professionals, the majority of attendees surveyed said that while they have a food safety plan, their plan doesn’t flex based on who at the company is involved and what their functions are. At a time when responsibilities are shifting and you’re likely having to complete more tasks with fewer people, it’s important to view your food safety plan through that lens. Where do you need to make adjustments to your team’s responsibilities to ensure you’re not letting food safety slip? It's unlikely that anyone on your team comes to work looking to do something wrong. But mistakes happen, and when they occur because staff assume they know how to complete a task but aren’t doing it correctly, it can be difficult to get them to adjust. One example is handwashing – even though it might seem like common sense, it’s often done inadequately and the consequences to your food safety can be significant. You can reinforce a learning culture by starting with the assumption that no one knows the proper protocols for what they’re about to be taught. Have regular reviews of what your team needs to know, identify key food safety metrics to reach, and clarify that assessments of their performance will be tied to these metrics. Bring in some targeted coaching to help reinforce areas where metrics aren’t measuring up. |
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