![]() Little seems to spread more reliably than norovirus – or the fear of catching one. In a grab bag of seasonal illnesses, norovirus still stands out for its potential impact on businesses. According to a recent FDA study on norovirus prevention, excluding ill employees from the workplace had the biggest impact on consumer illnesses and also resulted in fewer norovirus cases. But the study also found that excluding ill employees was most effective when the business took extra precautions – such as increased handwashing in general, handwashing prior to the use of gloves, eliminating the need for employees to have hand contact with restroom surfaces, and improving the cleaning and sanitizing of restroom surfaces. Looking at these practices, is there room for your business to make changes? Doing so could help you dodge norovirus, along with other illnesses making the rounds this winter. ![]() Restaurants looking to improve or sustain their food safety records have several hurdles to clear right now: Even if the business has solid training materials and is keeping up with increased onboarding of new employees, the restaurant could still fall short on the follow-up and allow a problem to slip by simply because it was not tracked. When a food safety problem occurs in your restaurant, what corrective action is required? Who is responsible for correcting it? How will a problem be tracked to ensure progress and prevent recurrence? Documenting your food safety procedures from start to finish and clarifying how you will manage the back end of an issue can help you ensure that the steps you take early on to protect safety are supported with strong follow through and a clear set of corrective actions. ![]() Managers have to deliver negative feedback sometimes. Maybe there is a food safety task that is a repeat problem – or perhaps a team member has a hard time getting it right. Managers stand the best chance of having any negative feedback sink in and result in corrective action if they surround any negative feedback with a greater amount of positive recognition of what a person is doing well. Recognition is one of the seven food safety pillars that the food safety consultancy Steritech uses to evaluate a restaurant’s food safety management. Ironically, it tends to be a weak area for many businesses, even though it often provides the motivation needed for change to occur. You can build trust across your team by weaving thanks and recognition into the fabric of the training and support you provide. Thank people for keeping your business safe and encourage (and reward) your team members who recognize and reinforce it with their peers too. ![]() Even if your business has a strong food safety record and culture, the rapid turnover of a workforce can chip away at it if you don’t take action to protect it. A report from Food Safety Magazine encourages businesses to rise to the challenge in four steps using the acronym SAVE: Standardize your processes across your locations and production zones. Automate processes where possible in an effort to simplify your training and compliance procedures. Validate the effectiveness of hygiene protocols and compliance using tools that can keep you on track. Finally, educate people across your organization about the “why” of food safety – it helps people retain both the training material and your expectations of them when it comes to protecting the business. ![]() The root cause of a repeat food safety problem may not be what you think. When something goes wrong, looking a few layers beneath the surface to understand it. For example, perhaps a drink dispenser isn’t being cleaned as often or as effectively as it should be. Why is it not being cleaned properly? The scheduled team isn’t doing it. Why not? Well, they are almost entirely new to the business – maybe their training hasn’t sunken in. Or, maybe they have been distracted by other tasks. Maybe they are intimidated by the manager working at that time and didn’t want to ask. Maybe the solution needed to clean it simply isn’t at the right concentration. Asking why a problem is happening – and then applying that same question to your response until you land on a clear cause – can help you determine the best corrective action. The cause of the problem may be several steps removed from the manifestation of that problem. ![]() When a general manager is asked who on their team is responsible for food safety, a common answer is “everyone.” On the surface, that answer makes sense – protecting food safety should be everyone’s job. But it can end up meaning that no one is responsible, with everyone assuming someone else on the team knows the right way to clean a piece of equipment or complete any number of important food safety tasks. An FDA study found that there are more than 60 percent fewer critical issues when the person in charge could describe the operation’s food safety management system. The system should include specific procedures, training and monitoring of how staff are carrying out procedures – and for any critical procedures, the food safety management system should identify the specific people responsible, as well as where they can find additional information if they need help. Does your food safety management system have that degree of clarity? If not, your team members may be assuming that someone else has an important responsibility covered. ![]() Does your restaurant’s food safety culture run deep – or could it easily become watered down with the departure of certain staff who reinforce it? If you can bring greater standardization to your food safety processes, both within a facility and across your locations if you operate more than one, this will go a long way in helping you ensure the consistency you need to weave food safety into the fabric of your business. Consider all of your food safety processes. Are any of them unnecessarily complex – or applied slightly differently in one location than another? How can you make each process simpler, easier to follow, and applied in a standard way across your organization? ![]() Cross-contamination can happen easily in a busy restaurant kitchen with staff juggling a variety of food preparation tasks. Making it as easy as possible to keep certain foods – particularly raw meat, seafood, poultry and eggs – separate from other foods can help minimize safety risks. That includes having separate containers for these foods when shopping for them/collecting them, having dedicated space on the lowest shelf of the refrigerator for storing the foods (and enclosing them in sealed containers), and using a separate, color-coded cutting board when preparing these foods for cooking. Reinforcing with staff that they must avoid washing these foods is important too, since the splatters can spread germs around the kitchen. ![]() Food safety training is never one-and-done, but you don’t want to have to review content because the same mistakes happen repeatedly. Food safety and training expert Brita Ball advises operators to consider the purpose of their training, including what they want staff to think, feel and do as a result of it. For example, a senior manager focused on the impact of food safety on the business may respond to a case study about the consequences of a food safety mistake, while a frontline employee may respond better to quick, inspiring lessons delivered in pre-shift team huddles over the course of several weeks or months. Then make the reinforcement of each lesson easy and positive – through signage and other prompts in your facility, consistent results tracking, and positive reinforcement through rewards. ![]() About 60 percent of all foodborne disease outbreaks in the U.S. are caused by foodservice establishments. To change that figure in a more positive direction, restaurants might take some cues from robust food safety processes required elsewhere. While a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan is mandatory for many food production facilities, it is voluntary for restaurants – but a Process HACCP plan is tailored to foodservice businesses and could be helpful to establishments struggling with food safety. As a recent Food Safety Magazine report explains, a Process HACCP plan helps define the flow of food preparation in a kitchen for all products, much like the flow of food in a manufacturing facility production line. It includes every recipe from the stage of sourcing ingredients through receiving, storing, preparing and serving them, offering the opportunity to identify and prevent potential hazards at each step – before they become sources of foodborne illness for guests. |
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