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.
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.
