Food safety audits provide an essential function to any restaurant chain. They help ensure the safety of the public against foodborne illnesses and provide restaurants with the information they need to fuel corrective action. Food safety audit forms should enable auditors to give a fair, objective and consistent assessment of every restaurant. However, companies frequently sabotage their evaluation process with ineffective and inefficient forms.
To help companies overcome these hurdles, I’ve compiled the eight best practices for creating and refining food safety audit forms. These best practices can be tailored to evaluation forms in any industry. Here are the first four:
Best Practice #1: Make Questions Clear and Concise
When writing the questions for an audit form, it’s important to craft them carefully so auditors never have to guess or give their opinion. Audit forms should be thoroughly examined to make sure any gray areas are removed to avoid subjectivity.
For example, I once had a company with this question on their audit form: “Are the cinnamon rolls good?” First of all, you should never have a taste test on a food safety audit form because if something tastes bad to one person, it doesn’t mean there’s a safety issue. And second, that question is vague and subjective. Every auditor will give a completely different answer according to his or her personal preference. By instead asking specific questions about the temperature, color and size of the rolls, the auditor’s opinions are now taken out of the equation. Also, by including the proper temperature range on the form, as well as diagrams or pictures of properly colored and sized rolls, the auditor will know exactly what to look for.
Best Practice #2: Build Dynamic Forms
When trying to make evaluations more effective, it’s important to ask yourself, “Do the questions on this audit form provide sufficient information to drive change and promote corrective action?” I can’t tell you how many audit forms I’ve seen that were actually a giant checklist of yes or no questions. For example, “Is food in the restaurant at the proper temperature, yes or no?” While that may seem like a logical question, when asked without any specific follow-up questions, it does not give you enough detail.
[Read my blog on Best Practices on Implementing Effective Corrective Action Systems.]
Let’s say that a giant stack of completed “yes or no” audit forms arrives at the corporate office and a trend emerges — there is food out of temperature. Now what? There is really no way for them to identify the root cause if they don’t know which food is out of temperature, where in the restaurant the auditor found it, and what the temperature was. Instead of a “flat form” of yes or no questions, all auditors need what RizePoint calls a “dynamic form.”
In RizePoint’s platform, dynamic forms offer about 20 different question types, allowing companies to tailor what specific information their questions capture. One of the most popular question types is the question tree. If auditors are asked the question, “Is food out of temperature?” and they check “no,” the platform then takes them to the next question, allowing them to bypass irrelevant follow-up questions, thus making the whole process more efficient. On the other hand, if they check “yes,” then a series of relevant questions automatically pop up on their screen — “Which food is out of temperature? What temperature is it? Where in the restaurant did you find it?” With this information, people in the corporate office can see, for example, the problem is the chicken salad, it was out of proper temperature by six degrees, and the auditor found it in the walk-in cooler. Now the company can take corrective action by developing training for that restaurant on how to better maintain their walk-in cooler and how to prepare the chicken salad to prevent it from falling below standard temperature.
Best Practice #3: Make Correct Answers Consistent
Do you remember taking the SAT in high school, how they would try to trip you up by phrasing questions in such a way that it was hard to determine the correct answer? Well, companies sometimes do that with the way they phrase questions on audit forms.
Tom Graves, the software administrator and quality assurance manager for RizePoint, explains it this way: Make sure your correct answer choices to questions are consistent throughout the form as much as possible. You don’t want to switch between “Yes” being the correct, intuitive answer on one question and then “Yes” being an incorrect answer on another. For example:
Are the floors clean? Yes – correct, No – incorrect
Is the ice machine clean? Yes – correct, No – incorrect
Are there any pests in the facility? Yes – incorrect, No – correct
By changing the last question to, “Is the facility free of pests?” you can keep “yes” as the correct answer throughout the list, thus preventing confusion and enabling consistency.
Best Practice #4 Make Your Scoring Logic System Logical and Available
When auditors begins an evaluation, even if they have the most well-formatted questions in the world, they’ll be unable to give a fair assessment of the restaurant without a logical scoring system.
There are critical violations versus non-critical violations on food safety audit forms. Before an audit form ever goes out into the field, corporate decision-makers need to make sure their scoring system for these two types of violations is logical. RizePoint’s Project Manager Ashley Powers, a long-time veteran in restaurant operations, had this to say about scoring: “Use points to make a ‘point.’ If a question is critical to your operations, make it a high-point value and instruct the auditor to give all points for compliance and zero points for failing to meet standards. This removes subjectivity from the scoring.”
Once companies have established their scoring system, they need to make sure that system is readily available on the food safety audit form. Many companies expect their auditors to memorize the scoring system. If the auditor forgets and has to guess, which is especially common when an auditor is new, he or she might only take off three points for a particular violation. But another auditor might take off five, and now the overall score is off.
By establishing a logical scoring system and including it on the form, companies can help ensure each store gets a fair and consistent assessment.
In summary, by taking special care to craft the questions and the scoring system for food safety audit forms, companies can help ensure their individual restaurants receive fair and accurate assessments.
In Part 2, I’ll cover best practices #5-8 for food safety audit forms. Stay tuned.
Read Part 2 here.