The Critical Role of Staff Training and Education in Food Safety for Foodservice Professionals

In mid-June, my colleagues and I at Kansas State University offered our Serving up Science: The Path to Safe Food in Schools course. The course was sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service and has brought 50+ school foodservice professionals to campus each year over the last several years to learn about food safety from food safety experts. It was bittersweet because it was our last offering of the course, but we’ve been fortunate to train almost 650 individuals from almost all 50 states and each of the US outlying islands.

As we concluded the week-long session, I began reflecting on the importance of continuing to learn – whether it is about food safety or anything in our lives. In the food safety environment, staying updated on industry trends, best practices, and technological advancements is essential for maintaining high standards. Ongoing learning enables foodservice employees to better adapt to changing regulatory requirements and emerging challenges – such as sesame being added to the list of most common allergens in the US, making the Big 8 the new Big 9.

In higher education we refer to it as “life-long learning”, but whatever you call it, continuous learning fosters innovation, improves problem-solving skills, and enhances job satisfaction.  Employees feel more empowered to contribute to the organization and their work teams in meaningful ways.

Continuing to train and educate staff about food safety is an important aspect of developing and maintaining the culture of safe food that we so often discuss in the food safety world. Regular training ensures that employees remain informed about best practices and industry standards, equipping them with the skills needed to handle food safely, minimizing the risk of contamination and foodborne illnesses. By reinforcing proper hygiene, safe food handling techniques, and effective sanitation practices, ongoing education instills a culture of vigilance and responsibility among your staff.

… continuous learning fosters innovation, improves problem-solving skills, and enhances job satisfaction.   

My hope is that this continuous training and reinforcement will help your staff develop good food safety habits, like properly hand washing. Habits can become an important part of our daily lives and in the context of food safety, can help us truly create the food safe culture that we need to effectively change employee behavior.  One of my favorite quotes is by Tony Dungy, the famed NFL coach, who said, “champions don’t do extraordinary things, they do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

They follow the habits they’ve learned…everything comes back to what your employees have learned. Don’t let those habits they demonstrate in your business be the bad habits they brought with them from their previous employer.  Or the habits they brought with them from home because they have never worked in a foodservice operation before.

Utilize continuous education and training as a proactive approach to food safety. It does not need to be a full 8- or 16-hour food safety class; it may just be a quick 5- to 10-minute pre-shift meeting or maybe an hour-long seminar. And remember, food safety training and education doesn’t always need to be about the nuts and bolts of food safety, in other words, it doesn’t always need to be the tried-and-true food safety topics we’ve all come to know – how to wash your hands, when to wash your hands, correct end-point cooking temperatures, etc. It might be a local health inspector discussing how they conduct a food safety investigation when an outbreak occurs. It might be a local farmer discussing the food safety practices they implement on the farm to protect food before it comes it your back door. It might be a person in the community sharing how a foodborne illness impacted their family.

While the nuts and bolts of food safety are important, sometimes it’s these other discussions about food safety that cause true behavior change in employees that ultimately improves compliance with food safety recommendations. That continuous learning also demonstrates your support of food safety and cultivates a culture of excellence and accountability that can permeate all aspects of your business. Risk Nothing. 

 

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!

Produce Safety: Special Considerations

In our last blog, I talked about general produce safety. Today, I want to talk about some special products—melons, tomatoes, leafy greens, and sprouts. These are all foods that have a history of bacterial contamination leading to foodborne illness. I also want to discuss salad bars because they have some special risks.