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.

 

Notes: Heading 2, Centered, Red Text, Animated

Food Defense—What is Your Game Plan?

We are into the season of Friday Night Lights and for many of you, this is a time when offensive and defensive strategies are discussed and rehashed during Monday morning quarterbacking sessions. Most of you working in foodservices have your “offensive” game under control with menu item and service strategies to ensure customer satisfaction--a big part of your play book. But, how is your “defensive” game? Do you have procedures in place to protect food from intentional contamination? In this blog, we will cover some background on food defense and discuss whether it really is a necessary strategy. In the second posting for this month, action steps for operations to consider will be presented.

Evaluating Food Safety

One of the suggestions I made in the last blog was to assess the food safety culture in your organization by observing the food handling techniques of workers. Let’s explore that some more. You can do an overall assessment or you can hone in on specific areas of the operation, such as production or cleaning practices. Remember, when the environmental health inspector visits your operation, he/she just gets a snapshot of what is going on in your operation on that particular day at that specific time. You are there nearly every day, so you have a much better understanding on what really happens in your operation.

September is Food Safety Education Month: The Culture of Food Safety

Developing a culture of food safety is important for any foodservice operation. You may be wondering--just what is a culture of food safety? Let’s start talking about it by first defining what is meant by culture. When you look culture up in the dictionary, you will see terms such as shared knowledge, beliefs, values, attitudes, and meanings; a way of life; patterns of behavior; learned behavior of a group of people; and transmitted from generation to generation. I think these descriptors provide good insight into the meaning of a culture of food safety. You can also think about where you grew up, and a vision of culture comes. For example, I grew up in rural Oklahoma, graduating in the 1970’s with a class of 24 students. My culture instilled in me an appreciation for rural life, hard work, and independence. As I grow older, I realize I haven’t changed very much from my early years, even though I have completed a PhD, lived a lot of places, and traveled throughout the world!