Food safety always been critical to the success of restaurants. In addition to protecting customer and employee health, good food safety practices are the foundation of your brand reputation. Maintaining a good behavior-based food safety culture is more important than ever as we work to help the restaurant industry recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

However, making food safety an integral part of company culture can feel daunting. For many employees, this is just another box to check as they go about their day. They learn about cross contamination, proper hot and cold storage, and thorough cooking, but without a strong connection to the consequences and real buy-in from employees, you won’t reach a level where food safety is deeply embedded in company culture. 

So how do you reach that point? It’s not as hard as it seems. 

1. Talk More about Food Safety

For many restaurants, the conversation around food safety starts and ends with employees obtaining their food handlers permits. You cannot expect employees to care about food safety if it’s not a regular part of the conversation. 

Add more food safety information to your training, and make your training is more than a one-time event. Employees need regular reminders about best practices to help combat sloppy habits that can form over time. You don’t need to spend hours at a time, even a small update monthly or quarterly lets employees know this is something they should care about and helps them remember proper food safety procedures. 

Use concrete examples of the risks that come with poor food safety practices. Don’t just say that a certain behavior can allow bacteria to grow, talk about how that can sicken customers, lead to restaurant closures, and do long-term damage to the trust customers have in your business. Making consequences more concrete reinforces why these conversations need to happen. 

2. Make Food Safety a Collaborative Concept 

Most of us have had the experience of a new rule or process being dictated by a corporate office. There was likely an important reason for that rule, but without giving you and your fellow employees buy-in, the adoption was likely low or poorly implemented. 

So you need to get employees involved in some way while still emphasizing the importance of specific steps that prevent foodborne illness. How? Regular self-assessments. Employees are so used to seeing audits as the one time a year where they get graded and given a list of areas of improvement that they may not realize audits can be a two-way street. 

You can empower employees to become a team of chief quality officers by having them perform regular self-assessments. Not only will you get visibility into day-to-day operations, but they will also have an opportunity to provide feedback to you. When employees know their input is going somewhere and could make things different, you will begin to get the type of feedback that will improve overall food safety.   

3. Show How It Makes a Difference

Integrate the data you collect into a quality management system that will help you analyze trends, identify potential trouble spots, and review compliance in specific locations. Then let employees know what you found. 

Recognize and applaud improvements, and show areas that could use reinforcement. Employees are more willing to invest effort into the food safety culture when they get to see it is making a difference. 

In a world where every customer is now a spot auditor watching for unsafe behaviors, it’s critical that you elevate your food safety culture above minimum requirements. We know it can seem intimidating to work on creating a behavior-based food safety culture at your company, but the steps to get started are within reach. 

Want to get more information about how to implement and cultivate a food safety culture at your company? Check out our webinar with Food Safety Tech where Aden Donaldson, McDonald’s Restaurants Limited​ Quality Assurance Consultant, talks about how technology has helped drive a transformation in their food safety culture.