Like everyone else who reads about outbreaks of foodborne illness, my heart immediately goes out to the people who have fallen ill. But I also find myself sending mental sympathies to the unfortunate organizations that unwittingly served up pathogens.
Although outbreaks might seem to be a matter of ill fortune, they mostly are not.
It’s tempting for eatery owners and managers to focus on the freshness, flavor, and appearance of their offerings — the things that are easy to see. But to truly protect your customers and business, you must get into the nitty-gritty and difficulties of managing the things you can’t see — namely pathogens such as E.coli and salmonella — which can arrive on even the most upscale, finely farmed foods.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. But it’s worth the effort. One outbreak can drive away loyal customers, drive down stock prices, and put even the most successful eating establishments on the skids.
The good news is that using food safety best practices and crafting auditable policies around them is easier than ever. With a good quality management solution in place, chances are excellent that you’ll never find your eatery’s name in the news. Here’s what you can do to get started.
Food Safety Best Practices
- Educate Employees
You can’t follow the rules if you don’t know them. Thorough onboarding and continual training are your first line of defense. Make initial and regular instruction part of an automated action plan so sessions are easy to track and lapses are simple to correct. Follow up with mandatory and optional food-safety instructions with periodic reminders.
- Keep Workspaces Clean
Cleanliness is the first commandment when it comes to food safety best practices. Work areas should be cleaned using the right soaps, cleansers, and techniques to stay safe. Again, auditing stores and employees and using those audits to trigger trainings is the proven way to keep workspaces scrupulously clean.
- Mandate Handwashing Policies
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends 20 seconds of scrub time with soap. Posting reminders can prompt your employees to achieve this goal, but if you have a “smart” sink, an automated food-safety auditing system can measure how long employees lather up. This way you can know when more training is needed.
- Buy from Reputable Suppliers
Food-contamination vectors abound: unsanitary water, poor harvest-time handling, dirty warehousing, and so forth, all increase the odds of food contamination. Suppliers are your eyes on the ground that can help stop issues before they hit your door.
Consider suppliers with great reputations over the lowest bids. Once you have suppliers, audit them and work with them to do their own audits. Blockchain technology and automated software will help them and you understand where problems occur so recalls can happen fast.
- Wash All Produce
Even prewashed, pre-packaged produce can carry contaminates. No matter how much you trust your suppliers and train your employees, it’s important to audit each party when it comes to produce. If vendors and employees wash produce in a clean environment using clean water and handle it with clean hands, you know the washing has been done correctly.
- Monitor Food Temperatures
Poorly stored and improperly cooked foods increase the odds that pathogens will survive long enough to infect your customers. Regularly auditing storage areas and temperatures as well as cooking temperatures is key to keeping food safe. You can even use cloud-based software and thermocouple integration can even give you automated alerts in real time when temperatures are out of whack.
- Avoid Cross Contamination
To decrease contamination risks, different utensils and work surfaces should be used during different processes of food prep and cooking. Raw and cooked foods should never be handled with the same utensils or on the same surfaces.
- Stop Sick Employees from Working
No matter how short-handed you are, letting a sick employee work is a huge food-safety issue. An outbreak can have long-lasting effects to your business, but an employee recovering at home has an incredibly short-term effect on your business. For this reason, it’s smart to provide paid sick days for employees whenever possible.
- Stay Up-to-date with Regulations
FSMA is a huge concern for your business, but it isn’t your only worry. A number of state, federal, and international agencies issue food-safety regulations and recommendations. Organizations such as NSF International compile these regulations into physical handy volumes or digitized files that auditors can take into the field for reference. Regulations change in response to new research and new types of products, and your audits have to reflect those changes. This process can become simplified if you use a digital auditing service.
- Use Digital Auditing
When you go digital, several things get easier for you. You can gather data in a searchable, central database; with that data, you can see issues earlier and before they become huge problems; and all together this means you can act and pivot quickly before any internal issues becomes tomorrow’s headline. You can also immediately update audit forms, regulation materials, and other documents across your whole organization, which means everyone can stay on top of new rules. Click here to see what you should look for when seeking out a quality management solution.
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