Announcement from FoodHandler’s Sales Manager
We are pleased to announce that our new food safety consultants—Dr. Jeannie Sneed and Dr. Cathy Strohbehn—will be writing blogs twice each month, on the first and fifteenth. Their goal is to make these blogs relevant, and to continue conversations about food safety among foodservice operators. We invite you to contact them to ask questions, share success stories, make suggestions for blog topics, or provide other thoughts you have about food safety. You can email them at foodsafety@foodhandler.com
Margie Wiemer
Sales Manager
Exclusion and Restrictions: Understanding Employee Health and the Food Code
I received a call earlier in the month from a foodservice operator who suspected that one of their employees may have fallen ill and wondered if they had to send the employee home for the day. Once I started to ask a few more questions, it became obvious that the operator wasn’t really in-tune with the food code requirements on restrictions or exclusions for employees who may not be feeling well. Given that most operations are dealing with staff shortages currently and the fact that we are about to head into the fall and winter – when we tend to see an increase in upper respiratory and other illnesses, such as the flu - it seemed like a very timely and important topic for the blog this month.
Cross Contamination and the Surfaces that go Unnoticed
In October, I ran across a new research study published in the Journal of Food Protection in early-September. The article explored cross contamination in consumer kitchens during meal preparation. One of the authors was a previous SafeBites presenter, Dr. Ellen Shumaker, at North Carolina State University. Although the setting was consumer kitchens and not the commercial kitchen many of you deal with daily, the findings were very applicable to what we often see in the foodservice setting.
Emergency Preparedness: The Not-so Calm After the Storm
If you and your foodservice operation have been hit by an emergency or other disaster, what comes next and how do you move forward? Much of the answer to this is predicated on the actual disaster that you are dealing with – a flood is certainly a much different than a fire, but some of the food safety considerations remain the same if your business has been left intact and has not been damaged by the disaster.
Emergency Preparedness and Responding to a Disaster with Food Safety in Mind
As I write the first blog this month, the realities of the devastation in Florida are coming to light as we also deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, which impacted Puerto Rico late in September. Recent news has been focused on the recovery efforts for all who have been impacted. Thus, I thought it would be fitting this month to discuss emergency disaster planning resources in our first blog and delve into recovering from a disaster in our second blog later this month.
