Halfway Gone, A Mid-Year Food Safety Check-up for your Foodservice Business
July is often a time when a portion of us in the foodservice business are at our prime. In many areas of the country, we are in the midst of our busiest season of the year. Yet, for those in other foodservice operations it is a slower time of year, where we can spend time refocusing on the busy season ahead. Whatever the case for you, as we cross over the halfway point of 2024, it is an ideal time to conduct a thorough food safety check-up.
As we all know, ensuring food safety isn’t just about meeting regulatory standards, it’s about safeguarding your customers’ health, protecting your reputation, and maintaining operational excellence. So, this is a great time of year to take a step back and conduct a comprehensive inspection and walk through of your entire operation from receiving to service and evaluate areas of concern. While not a comprehensive list, here are some things to pay particular attention to.
- Storage and Stock Rotation:
- Check coolers and freezers to ensure they maintain the correct temperatures for storing perishable items. If you haven’t developed temperature logs to track this daily, now is the time to start doing this – at FoodHandler, we’ve even created a log especially for this and it is available for free on our FoodHandler website. It could help prevent the loss of inventory in the future – and potentially save you lots of money should a cooler or freezer go down this summer.
- Ensure your dry storage room meets your cleanliness standards and is free of evidence of rodents and/or pests.
- Check to ensure your stock rotation practices are being followed by employees to prevent expired or spoiled goods from being used.
- Kitchen Cleaning and Sanitation:
- Assess the cleanliness of the kitchen as a whole. Most foodservice operations do a fairly good job at keeping the daily food preparation areas cleaned, but what about areas we don’t get too every day? The floor areas under standing equipment, the outside of ovens, the exhaust system in the kitchen? Have these been kept up to your standards?
- Schedule a professional pest control inspection to prevent infestations that could compromise food safety.
- While all personal hygiene standards are important, perhaps none more so than handwashing. Reinforce proper handwashing practices among staff and be sure to follow up on this every day.
- Staff Training:
- Verify that all staff members have received adequate training in food handling, hygiene, and safety protocols. If they have not, start planning a training session now, don’t wait.
- Ensure certifications for food safety are up to date for all relevant personnel.
- Supplier Relationships:
- Review the quality assurance measures in place with your suppliers to ensure they meet your food safety standards. Be sure to discuss this with the individual who receives your food and checks in the orders – they may not be telling you of recent issues they may have noticed.
… this is a great time of the year to take a step back and conduct a comprehensive inspection and walk through your entire operation from receiving to service and evaluate areas of concern.
After you’ve done your inspection, make sure you document what actions you took as a result. While I hope you never have to defend yourself in a food safety lawsuit, the fact is that documenting things now not only helps you keep up with your overall food safety program, but it also could help provide documentation for an affirmative defense in a lawsuit.
As a result of the inspection, you may notice that the policies and procedures you had implemented may not be performing as well as you had hoped. Update these now while the issues are fresh in your mind. Be sure to also note a day to do a follow-up inspection. Depending on what you discovered during this inspection, that may be a week from now, two weeks from now, or two months from now – whenever it is, schedule it in now and stay on top of your food safety program. Remember, consistent monitoring helps maintain high standards and promptly address any emerging issues.
A mid-year food safety check-up can be a solid proactive measure to protect your customers and your business. By investing time and resources into thorough inspections, staff training, and updating policies and procedures, you ensure that your foodservice establishment continues to operate at the highest standards of food safety. Risk Nothing.
Sanitation, Sanitation, Where Art Thou?
Continuing the theme I picked up on a few months ago, discussing common causes of foodborne illness, I’d like to focus this blog on cross contamination, more precisely sanitation. Sanitation is another issue that employees don’t often do at home, so they discount the importance of it in the food production environment. That is to say that they have never made someone sick at home because they only clean their countertops and they have likely never sanitized their kitchen, so why is it so important in a foodservice facility?
Handwashing: The Habit that Isn’t as Common as We May Think
Earlier this year, I started to focus our FoodHandler Food Safety blogs on common food safety issues faced in each foodservice operation across the world. We’ve covered some of the most common issues, but perhaps none is more common than improper hand hygiene.
Is Implementing a Color-Coded Food Safety Plan Right for your Operation?
Foodborne pathogens are by far the most prevalent cause of foodborne illness in the United States and across the world. There are 31 known agents that cause foodborne illnesses, and more that are unspecified or yet undiscovered – remember, E. Coli 0157:H7 wasn’t identified until the early-1980s. It is estimated each year, 48 million illnesses occur because of these known and unknown pathogens, resulting in over 3,000 deaths.
Maintaining your Equipment: Is it the Missing Ingredient in your Recipe for Food Safety?
Although I am no longer in day-to-day operations, between our students and foodservice lab at the university and my volunteer activities in my local church, I keep a close hand in food production. This past week, I had the opportunity to lead a group of men at our church in preparation of a luncheon for 100 women who were attending a spirituality retreat. Over the course of the morning, I realized our main cooler in the kitchen was not functioning properly and was about 10˚F above the required temperature. While we do have a commercial kitchen, we do not routinely log temperatures, so when the unit started to malfunction is questionable. Even more concerning was not the lunch we were preparing for, but the dinner that was served the night before for 300+ families in the parish.
