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?
If you want to see how seriously your employees take sanitation, look no further than the first thing they do when they start production in the morning. Do employees start food production upon first arriving in the morning or do they take time to sanitize all the work surfaces before starting production? This may seem like an unnecessary step, especially in operations where there may only be one production shift, like in a school system. However, you can never really be too sure of what occurred during the evening when no one was using the space. Was a maintenance person working in the area with their work bag on the table? Did an after-hours delivery drive place boxes that were sitting outside on the ground on the preparation table? Did a rodent or cockroach (although we hate to think of this – it does happen) run across the table in the wee hours of the morning? Or perhaps the staff the day before didn’t really sanitize as well as they had thought they did.
If you want to see how seriously your employees take sanitation, look no further than the first thing they do when they start production in the morning…do they take time to sanitize all the work surfaces before starting production?
Often, our employees like to show off their clean kitchens, and certainly a clean kitchen is something to be proud of. Afterall, it cannot be sanitized if it is not first clean. However, we must be sure to educate our employees that we cannot stop at clean. We must be mindful to sanitize property and avoid cross contamination. A few years ago, we placed a camera in a school to watch sanitation practices and were surprised as what we found at the end of the day. We’ve released the video and use it in training to help employees understand the importance of cleaning vs. sanitizing and have made it available online free of charge.
Be certain your employees are also aware of the sanitizer you use in your facility –on surfaces and within the three-compartment sink and/or dishwasher. They need to know what product to use, but also the specifics about the product – how to mix it, proper strength, the amount of contact time for it to be effective, and how to properly utilize test strips to ensure that the concentration is correct.
Once you are sure your employees are knowledgeable about your sanitizers, the tricky part is ensuring that they use them when they are supposed to do so. This is again where that culture of food safety comes into play. As a manager, you cannot be everywhere all the time, so you must have a supportive environment where employees are able to remind other employees to properly sanitize surfaces or equipment when they see that it has not been done correctly. Allowing all employees to hold each other accountable in a supportive environment will go a long way to not only providing the safe food culture, but also ensuring guest satisfaction and safety throughout your organization.
Late last week, we released our second SafeBites Webinar of 2022. In the webinar, Dr. Ellen Shumaker, who directs the outreach and extension activities for the Safe Plates program at North Carolina State University, discusses food safety messaging and the role of food safety culture in shaping employee and organizational behaviors. This is the second release of our new on-demand webinar, please drop me a note and let me know if you enjoy the new format or not. 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.
