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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Top Food Safety Websites
You ask…How do I learn about food safety regulation? What pathogens in foods can make me sick? What temperature should I safely cook my roast beef to and how do I take food temperatures? How do I clean and sanitize anything according to the FDA Food Code? What and where is the most recent version of the FDA Food Code? Where can I find food safety educational materials galore in book form or online? Do I need them in Spanish or a Chinese dialect?
A Little Poultry Safety Information
Chicken is the number one species of protein consumed by Americans – we eat about 80 pounds of it per year. Outbreaks of foodborne illness have long been associated with poultry and eggs usually by undercooking it or cross-contamination of other foods by raw poultry. Recent concerns about avian or bird flu put the direct focus on our fowl food with concerns about whether this awful disease can transfer from birds to humans.
The Basic Principles of Food Safety
Every food establishment uses, processes, and sells food in different ways. However, the general issues and key principles of food safety remain the same, whatever the style of the operation. All food safety training programs should contain the “big 3” factors that could cause food to become unsafe. Food must be kept out of harms way from human errors, but if you don’t train food workers what they are, they won’t know why these factors are so important to your operation. The basics can make us or break us in one or maybe two food handling mistakes.
Be Aware When You Prepare – Food Prep Tips
The subject of food preparation covers some very broad, basic principles within food safety, with many steps associated with “risk” in some recipes. Certainly, preparation steps are where the most mistakes have occurred if a foodborne illness should occur. Outbreaks usually happen when more than one mistake occurs during prep, but sometimes it only takes one. Cooking is the biggest risk for raw foods, but all foods become ready-to-eat foods at some point in final preparation steps and that’s where the most care is required.
