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.
One of the main causes of pathogenic contamination is often cross contamination, which is the transfer of harmful bacteria from one person, objective, or item to another. For example, a cook doesn’t wash their hands thoroughly after handling raw chicken and cutting romaine lettuce. While many of you in foodservice are aware of the color-coding food safety systems in place in many foodservice and food production operations, last month I had received a question about these systems, so I wanted to take a bit to discuss these in the blog. In the foodservice world, we are not as able to color-code and sperate things via zones as well as our counterparts in food processing plants; the truth is that all foodservice operations would benefit by implementing and utilizing a color-coded system for food preparation.
The typical color-coding system would involve having different knives, cutting boards, utensils, and even storage containers for different types of food items. The system should be designed to what is best for your operation, but the typical system involves using red for raw meat, yellow for raw poultry, blue for seafood, green for produce, grey for cooked protein, and white for dairy and bread. There is now a purple color added to the mix to help alleviate cross contact issues related to allergens.
Having a strong color-coding system in your operation can help employees to visually identify food safety issues during production…and supervisors can easily scan the work area to denote possible cross contamination issues.
Having a strong color-coding system in your operation can help employees to visually identify food safety issues during production. Not only can this be a benefit for employees, but supervisors can easily scan the work area to denote possible cross contamination issues that may be present during any given point in product. However, a few key items must be in place. First, employees must be trained to know which color goes with which items and this must be reinforced by appropriate signage and effective managerial control. Recently, I was in a foodservice operation where they had all the colors available to implement a strong color-coded system, but sadly I don’t think the managers nor employees gave any thought to how the colors were intended to be used. Yellow was being used for produce, green for raw meat, and purple for dairy. No one was trained on why the color-coded items were purchased (assuming they were purchased for this reason and not just to have different colored cutting boards, knives, and storage containers). Second, be sure to have enough of each item to meet the demands of your operation. If you intend to have green utilized for only produce, make sure you have enough in stock to meet the demands of your employees. In the course of a typical day of production, your employees will intend to use the correct item, but when under stress to get food out to the guest, safety will be pushed aside if what they need is not present and you don’t have a strong food safety culture.
When developing your color-coded plan, don’t forget to explore your glove options and build these into your plan. FoodHandler has several different color options available in our Thinsense™ line, including clear, black, blue, pink, and coming soon, white.
Keep an eye out for the release of our second SafeBites Webinar of 2022 in the coming weeks. We hope you like the new on-demand only option with the Webinars. If you have any questions as you watch them, be sure to follow-up with me via email. 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.
