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

Person in Charge has Major Role Related to Employee Health

In the last blog, we talked about the importance of having healthy employees working in a foodservice operation and how that is related to foodborne illness. In this blog, we discuss employee health controls, one of five key public health interventions needed to control for risk factors of foodborne illness. The purpose of this control is to minimize the possibility that employees contaminate food. That means that employees need to be healthy, and that they report any symptoms or illnesses that might impact the safety of food served to customers.

Healthy Employees Keep Food Safe

Last month we talked about norovirus, the leading cause of foodborne illness outbreaks. Today we will turn our attention to overall employee health, and its role in keeping food safe. Many of you who are in my generation can relate to the fact that you rarely called in to work sick, and when you did you probably couldn’t get out of bed. You may also relate to being a manager and discouraging people from calling in sick because it was so difficult to be short-handed. Well, that mind set just has to change for the health of everyone!