Food Safety Doesn’t Just Happen!
No, food safety in retail foodservices doesn’t happen by accident—it is well planned and executed. It is controllable and foodborne illnesses are preventable! While food workers implement correct food handling and cleaning practices, the operators (managers, supervisors, or the person-in-charge) play a key role in making sure that safe food handling practices are known to all and actually followed. Today, we are introducing you to the term active managerial control and what it means in your operation. In the next blog, we will talk about how it is implemented in foodservice operations.
What is active managerial control? It is a proactive approach to food safety where procedures and systems are in place to identify potential food safety issues, and allow you to address them before they become a problem. For example, a supervisor reviews temperature logs and sees that one refrigerator has been higher than 41o F. A repairman is quickly called in to repair the refrigerator. This approach to managing food safety means that potential problems are identified, and procedures to prevent or quickly address are in place. Not only does this control against any threats to the safety of food, it also reduces the possibility of receiving a violation when the inspector visits. We believe that there should be NO surprises with a health inspection—a good manager will know the results before the environmental health specialist provides the report. With that being said, there should not be
violations because you are identifying problems and making changes to correct them!
Now think about that. If we wait for an inspection to identify problems, then a lot of time may pass with no mitigation of the problem. In many jurisdictions, health inspectors only visit once a year. Active managerial control provides for day-to-day oversight and increases the odds that problems are identified and corrected before anyone is impacted. A manager who practices active managerial control reinforces good food handling practices that mitigate food safety problems.
How can active managerial control impact foodborne illness? In a nutshell, foodborne illness can be reduced when managers implement active control. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified five broad categories of risk factors for foodborne illness:
- Food from Unsafe Sources
- Inadequate Cooking
- Improper Holding Temperatures
- Contaminated Equipment
- Poor Personal Hygiene
How many of these five risk factors can we control in our kitchen? Well, if you said “all of them” you are correct! After all, we control how we buy food and how we handle it once it is delivered to our operation. Who is that “we”? Well, it is every employee in the operation. With so many fingers on food safety, how do we know when something is not done correctly? That is really what active managerial control is all about! We have to have systems and procedures in place to ensure that our standard operating procedures are being followed. Let’s say that we have a fairly new cook in our operation who used to work at a local restaurant and who has been cooking all his life. Because of his experience, he was given the recipe book, the menus, and the production forecast, and sent off to do his job. After a half a dozen complaints from customers that the chicken was not cooked enough, the manager begins to investigate. She looks at the temperature logs and finds he is not recording them. Come to find out, he doesn’t take temperatures because he has cooked so long he just “knows” when food is done. What went wrong? Is that an example where having a manager more involved would have prevented the situation? In the mid-1980’s Drucker wrote a book on management that talked about “managing by walking around.” Isn’t that what active managerial control really is? Supervision is key to making sure that employees know how to do their jobs, and that safe food handling actually occurs. We’ll talk more later in the month about steps to implementing active managerial control.
Risk Nothing!
Foodborne Illness Myths & Facts
“It must have been something I ate.” That’s the typical statement when a person develops some relatively minor symptoms from food. Maybe not severe enough to go to the doctor so you choose to tough it out without medical care. Sudden onset of flu-like symptoms such as onset of stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting and fever could possibly mean you are the victim of a foodborne illness. The illness is sometimes referred to as “food poisoning”, but it’s often misdiagnosed.
Don’t Compromise: Clean and Sanitize
The subject is cleaning and sanitizing. Chefs, food service directors, managers and staff try to practice safe food-handling at every turn in the kitchen. Don’t let that effort go down the drain by slacking off on the many aspects of sanitation. That includes dish and ware-washing techniques (pots, pans, equipment), and cleaning all the areas that give us that “neat as a pin” appearance in your customers eyes. Customers seldom fail to bring that soiled silverware or glass with lipstick on it to the attention of the manager or wait staff. Improperly cleaning and sanitizing of food contact equipment does allow transmission of pathogenic microorganisms to food and ultimately our customer.
The Route to Safer Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
Although fruits and vegetables are one of the healthiest foods sources in our diet, we continue to have foodborne disease outbreaks of significance from produce, sometimes affecting large groups of people in multiple states because of their wide distribution. The CDC estimates that fresh produce now causes a huge number of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States. Produce needs our continued food safety efforts at the restaurant level as well as at the stages in agricultural production. Occasionally, fresh fruits and vegetables can become contaminated with harmful bacteria or viruses, such as Salmonella, E. coli 0157:H7, Norovirus, and Hepatitis A. This contamination can occur at any point from the field to our table. If eaten, contaminated fruits and vegetables can cause foodborne illness.
Be Cool, Chill Out, Refrigerate Promptly!
The Cold Chain -- Keeping perishable foods at proper cold holding temperatures (between 28°F and 41°F maximum or 0°F for frozen food) from your food producers / manufacturers to your customers has to be one of our strongest links to safe food and high quality. Sometimes that is referred to in the food industry as “maintaining the COLD CHAIN”. Any slip ups in the cold chain, and we have a weak link. Most all of our state food regulations require 41°F as a cold maximum, but colder is a “best practice” policy to maintain.
