Welcome to National Food Safety Education Month!

In September of each year, we not only have the opportunity to celebrate Labor Day, but we also welcome National Food Safety Education Month! It is this time of the year when it is important to remember that Foodborne illnesses are still a major concern in the United States, although I am guessing many Americans don’t think about the safety of the food they eat as they go throughout their daily lives.  The statistics show one in every six Americans will suffer from a foodborne illness each year, for a total of about 48 million cases each year.

Luckily enough, there are thousands of Americans whose job is to help protect the food supply. From the farmer who raises the animals or plants the crops we harvest to sell in grocery stores, to the supermarket managers who monitor the temperature of their frozen and refrigerated display cases each day, to the food service manager who ensures all the proper steps are followed in the preparation of the meals that consumers eat in schools and restaurants across the United States on a daily basis. Along the way, the food is transported, stored, and inspected at various points, but ultimately each one of us bears some responsibility to ensure the food we eat is safe.

… there are thousands of Americans whose job is to help protect the food supply…but ultimately each one of us bears some responsibility to ensure that the food we eat is safe. 

While many of our readers are in the foodservice profession, there are several who I am guessing are not. Those who are not in the profession can play just as much of a role in keeping food safe as a professional, and it all starts at the grocery store. The FDA, CDC, and many state university extension agencies have many different resources to help you keep food safe in your home and ultimately protect your family from a foodborne illness.  Here are a few of my favorites to check out:

As we have discussed many times in these blogs, professionals have an even greater responsibility to protect the food they serve to guests.  In many cases, the food they serve will not just make four or five members of a family sick, but many, in some cases hundreds of people, could fall ill due to mistakes in a foodservice kitchen.  One step I would encourage all managers to undertake during this food safety month is to do an in-depth review of your recipes and incorporate crucial control points into each recipe you have.  This is one step that can have a huge impact on the safety of the food served in your operation and serves as a constant reminder for foodservice employees to cook food to the proper temperature. In most cases, small steps can help you transform your organization and truly set the foundation for a solid food safety culture.  Afterall, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

If you haven’t already checked it out, please check out the latest SafeBites Food Safety Webinar, “Creating Clarity for Exceptional Food Safety Results”, presented by Dr. Brett Horton. This webinar is a bit different than the past ones in that we don’t focus just on food safety but dig into how to create exceptional programs and develop a team. Achieving exceptional results requires trust, appropriate conflict to achieve optimum results, commitment, and accountability by all members of the organization. Of course, we do this while keeping food safety in mind, but the discussion could really apply to multiple aspects of your life. I promise you will learn something, I certainly did! Be sure to drop us a note if you enjoy the webinars or have suggestions for future content that you would like to learn. Risk Nothing.

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Developing Good Food Safety Habits

Good habits and habit development are something that has fascinated me for several years. If you’ve attended any the training programs or presentations that my colleagues and I have conducted through our Center for Food Safety in Child Nutrition Programs, you’ve likely heard me opine about the importance of habits and how habits are created. Many times, in foodservice operations we wonder why our staff don’t follow the food safety practices we have established in our operation. Perhaps they don’t wash their hands when they are required, perhaps they just don’t use the proper method of handwashing, or perhaps we find that they don’t complete our HACCP logs as often as our program dictates should occur. And while we can stomp our feet and say “it is their job, they should just do it”, it really isn’t that simple. We can’t order people to change, although if we could, business and human resources would be so much simpler.

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Getting Your Playbook for Food Safety Organized

As anyone who has ever worked in a foodservice operation knows, from the time food is received in your establishment to the time it is served to your customers, following proper food safety practices is crucial. What many don’t often think about is this time really should extend from the time the manager places their orders with their suppliers (including which purveyors you utilize), through the time the food is consumed – even if that consumption occurs off your premises and days after the original order was picked up by the guest. This is something that has certainly been highlighted by the pandemic as customers across the nation are utilizing take-out, curbside to go, and third-party delivery options more so now than ever before.

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Getting Started with Building the Infrastructure

Hopefully in our first January blog, we convinced you of the importance of establishing an infrastructure within your operation to support a safe food culture. So, how does one go about doing this? Well, like any major project, break it into small bites. In our opinion, having a written guide for employees that documents expectations related to food safety basics of employee health and hygiene, temperature controls, and cleaning and sanitizing is the first step. Having this documentation serves as a reference for training and helps fulfill the mission of most foodservice operators which is to serve safe, quality food.

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Food Safety Resolutions for the New Year

Finally, 2020 is in our rearview mirror and we can all turn the page to 2021! Resolutions for the new year might be more of the same from prior years (lose weight, exercise more, less screen time, etc.) OR you may have identified new practices to implement in your operation. If the latter, likely goals included some practices related to food safety – especially given the turmoil of 2020 and heightened concern by customers. It is our philosophy that attention to safe food handling practices is a win-win for any operation because of the direct relationship between food safety and food quality, which in turn leads to customer satisfaction. This past year has also demonstrated that attention to safety can affect the bottom line. Thus, the topic of our first SafeBites webinar for 2021 is on the topic of the return on investment of food safety, it is scheduled for January 20, so register now and please plan to attend.