Recommitting to Food Safety in 2025, One Meal at a Time
The start of a new year is a great time to cast aside old habits and the regrets of things you wanted to do but never found the time in past years. For the last few years, I have started out my blog for the year the same way – trying to encourage you to recommit yourselves and your business to food safety in the new year. Food safety has always been one of the cornerstones of public health and considering a few wide-spread and well publicized food safety outbreaks the U.S. experienced in 2024, food safety is certainly on the minds of our customers as we kick off the new year. Thus, it is the perfect time to refocus and reprioritize your food safety efforts – starting with the overall food safety environment in the United States.
The global food landscape has grown increasingly complex. Consider food miles, for example. Food miles is the distance that your food travels from where it was grown to where it was consumed. While the concept of food miles was developed with more of an eye toward sustainability and carbon emissions, the data is very useful in the food safety world, too. The most recent data shows that processed food in the United States travels approximately 1,300 miles, while fresh produce travels over 1,500 miles. Supply chains now span continents as opposed to cities or states as they may have in the early-1900s, and while we have more sophisticated technology to track food as it travels the food chain, it also shows how important it is to pay attention to recalls and other outbreaks to determine how they might impact our operations.
Take for example the most recent Listeria outbreak impacting a family-owned processing business. Before the outbreak, the company had over $1 billion in sales, and the recall of their products involved more than 7 million pounds. If a case of tomatoes, a case of ground beef, or any food product for that matter were recalled, would you be able to trace the product down in your production processes or would you just need to pull all of that type of product within your organization?
As we look at the foodborne outbreaks over the last year, many been mitigated or suppressed with good employee practices. Whether it is handwashing or controlling cross contamination, proper training of employees and ensuring that employees implement the knowledge they have received from training can go a long way in protecting our businesses. The start of the calendar year is always a good time to ensure your key staff are up to date on their food safety training and take stock of the new employees who need to go through training.
As I have said before, employee knowledge (and training) is great, but it is not the end all and be all. Food safety in the foodservice environment is not just about processes and technology—it’s about people, too. A strong food safety culture ensures that everyone involved, from our receiving staff to our chefs, and our servers to our managers know that nothing is so important that it cannot be done safely. Of course, this involves proper training, but it also requires a shared commitment to protecting our guests.
Recommitting to food safety in 2025 means embracing a proactive approach. It’s about staying informed, leveraging technology, fostering a safety-first mindset, and working collaboratively. Whether you’re in food production, foodservice, or preparing meals at home, every step counts in building a safer food system.
At FoodHandler, we are committed to helping you recommit yourselves to food safety in 2025! You are the reason we continue to provide free food safety resources and host our SafeBites Food Safety Webinars, all to bring you the most current information about food safety, right to your computer screen. We hope that all of this allows you to produce the safest food possible, one meal at a time. Risk Nothing.
Call out: Food safety in the foodservice environment is not just about processes and technology—it’s about people, too.
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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.
