![]() If you’re having problems with food safety and contamination, could your sanitizer be to blame? While microorganisms may develop resistance to sanitizer, but chances are better that your challenges are due to other issues around your facility. According to a Food Safety Magazine report, it’s more important to focus on following each step of the cleaning process, addressing problems with poorly designed equipment with crevices that can harbor microorganisms, applying your sanitizer over the entire surface, and being aware of biofilms that can form on surfaces and encase a microorganism (and require a different kind of treatment). ![]() Even before the pandemic, restaurant guests would make assumptions about the state of the restrooms and what they might indicate about the restaurant’s commitment to food health and safety. Now that guests are all the more aware of cleaning and sanitation practices, as well as the ways in which viruses can spread, it’s important that your restaurant presents you well. If your restaurant has high-traffic periods, make sure you have larger dispensers that help ensure you won’t get caught short on soap and hand towels. Replace air dryers. Finally, develop a clear checklist of maintenance tasks and have your staff check restrooms at regular intervals. Throughout the past year, restaurants that once had buffet lines, salad bars and other self-service stations have had to reinvent them for the current environment – and those changes may be permanent. This has also resulted in the introduction of more action stations and grab-and-go options, as well as changes in how employees are assigned to tasks within the operation. It’s a good time to make sure your team is up to date on current safety precautions. They should understand how to maintain proper temperatures for hot- and cold-held foods, preheat foods for hot-holding, prevent cross-contamination when bringing in fresh food or serving a guest, and when to discard food that has been sitting out for service.
A survey from US Foods found that 28 percent of delivery drivers said they had taken food from an order – and 50 percent of drivers had been tempted. It’s worth reviewing your delivery menu and removing items that are easy to pilfer – like fries – and using tamper-evident packaging and labels suited to the food and container to make sure everything arrives as it should. Paper-based labels can tear more easily than film-based labels and are more apt to show tampering if there is a removal attempt, but they also may not stand up as well to contact with liquids or condensation. Need a source for tamper evident solutions check out our selections from various vendors at https://www.foodserviceceo.com/tamper-evident-solutions.html
If you’re in a hurricane zone or have been experiencing an increase in extreme weather conditions in recent years, you’ve likely been making changes to your food safety and business continuity plans. Installing rooftop solar panels may help – in a number of ways. While the panels are more often associated with homes, they can provide businesses with extra risk protection and cost savings in case of power outages. And at a time when people are more concerned with their environmental impact, the use of renewable energy is a powerful way to share those values with guests. As plant-based proteins flood restaurant menus of all types, food safety practices around these foods may be lagging – all at a time when consumers have greater expectations for food safety overall. The nutrition company Kerry said because of the wide range of materials used in plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, plant-based proteins may be susceptible to microbial spoilage: “Like their meat-based counterparts, they are near neutral in pH, high in protein and moisture content so it is imperative that appropriate microbiological control mechanisms are put in place,” the company said. Does your operation have new procedures and training in place for protecting the safety of the new plant-based proteins you are bringing into your business?
Leafy greens and other vegetable row crops are a key source of E. coli infections. Indoor agriculture is on the rise – and it could provide restaurants with a means of minimizing the risk of foodborne illness and use of pesticides, while ensuring that the greens and other produce they want to serve is available to them year-round. Since indoor farming environments differ from conventional ones, there’s a new food safety certification program specifically for leafy greens grown via controlled-environment agriculture (CEA). The CEA Food Safety Coalition says the annual certification, which involves such factors as a hazard analysis, a review of a facility’s growing infrastructure and design, and an assessment of any pesticide use, can help educate regulators and consumers about the benefits of growing crops in controlled environments.
As restaurants welcome guests back into their dining rooms, operators are likely to have to stretch to accommodate the demand, making it easier for safety to fall through the cracks. Using digital checklists can help you uphold your safety standards and avoid a pile-up of risks throughout a shift. If your servers are using tablets to take orders, add a digital food safety app that provides a quick, easy-to-reference rundown of the cleaning and sanitation tasks that need to be done between guests – such as wiping down tables, chairs and any tabletop items.
Covid-era changes to restaurant dining can make it easy to overlook the many other aspects of food safety that a restaurant team must remember. Can you tap into tech to help your staff avoid information overload? Food Safety News suggests incorporating such measures as electronic checklists to prompt staff about procedures and instructions, automated prompts to help them avoid keeping food sitting out for too long, or alerts about issues that could become problems if not addressed quickly – like rising temperatures in a cooler. Finally, digitize any remaining paper-and-pencil processes in your business, like compliance checklists or records.
There’s nothing like a cool drink on a warm day. Just make sure your team is handling ice as safely as possible day to day, as your ice machine can be a haven for bacteria and viruses. Have employees wash hands before scooping ice from the bin. Store the scoop outside of the machine and consider it the only tool used to scoop ice – don’t use glassware, which could chip and cause a safety hazard or contaminate ice in the machine. Sanitize your scoop in your dishwasher. Finally, keep your ice machine door closed securely when not in use.
|
subscribe to our newsletterArchives
July 2024
Categories
All
|