Actionable Steps to Improve Your Food Safety Culture

Article Source: Actionable Steps to Improve Your Food Safety Culture - FSR magazine

What happens in your restaurant when no one is watching? Does your team take food safety seriously? Do they follow proper protocols, even on their busiest days? If there’s a food safety concern, do your employees know what to do? The answers depend on whether you’ve built a strong food safety culture, where your employees prioritize food safety through their actions, attitudes, and values. Does your culture emphasize food safety—from selecting vendors that prioritize this effort to storing, preparing, and cooking foods properly? And does your restaurant provide the necessary resources—including ongoing training, innovative tech tools, well-functioning equipment, effective sanitizers and disinfectants, etc.—so all employees can follow gold standard safety protocols at all times?

Every food business must develop a positive food safety culture to help demonstrate to key stakeholders (including customers, employees, regulators, etc.) that your organization prioritizes food safety and continuously follows best practice protocols. Additionally, having a positive food safety culture helps identify—and remediate—any potential risks, whether that’s a food shipment that was delivered at an improper temperature or an employee cross-contaminating during food prep.

It’s not enough just to say you’ve built a strong food safety culture. This is about taking action—and doing the right things.

Prioritize a Food Safety Culture

Building (and maintaining) a strong food safety culture directly impacts consumer health, regulatory compliance, and your brand’s reputation. Despite having more knowledge and tools at our disposal than any time in history, there are still 48 million foodborne illness cases annually, with 1 in 6 Americans getting sick from foodborne illnesses each year. Yet, according to a recent survey, only 49 percent of companies have a food safety culture plan. The foodservice industry must do better.

Promoting a food safety culture involves shifting our entrenched beliefs and adopting modern industry practices like minimizing chemical reliance, leveraging advanced technologies, embracing sustainability, and fostering forward-thinking leadership.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly 1 in 10 people get sick after eating contaminated food. In fact, approximately 50 percent of foodborne illness cases are caused by food safety culture failures.

Therefore, restaurants (and all food businesses) should:

• Understand the goal. A food safety culture refers to an organization’s practices and beliefs about the food they handle. This effort is more than just having policies in place. It’s about the mindset—and protocols—that your company follows daily.

• Train continuously. You can’t create an effective food safety culture without regular, ongoing food safety training programs for all employees. As part of this effort, empower employees. Create ownership and accountability to ensure they always follow proper food safety procedures.

·      Explain the “why”. It’s not enough to tell employees what to do. You must also explain why these protocols are so important. Ensure that your team understands why the rules are in place, and what could happen if they’re not followed—e.g., sickening customers, losing consumer trust, damaging your brand’s reputation, etc.

• Rely on technology. The FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety emphasizes how smart technologies are integral to the future of food safety. Tech tools – like AI, machine learning, and IoT—are elevating transparency, improving accuracy, and allowing brand leaders to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

• Use safe, effective sanitizers and disinfectants. Sanitizing and disinfecting are critical to maximize food safety, but is your restaurant using the right products? Not all sanitizers and disinfectants are created equally, so prioritize using EPA-approved, food safe solutions. Embrace products like Hypochlorous acid (HOCL), which is 80-100x more powerful than bleach and effective at killing 99.99 percent of pathogens, while also being sustainable, chemical-free, and safe for humans, foods, and the environment. Companies like EcoloxTech are offering cost-effective HOCL solutions that are becoming more widely used in the foodservice industry. HOCL from Ecoloxtech systems has been cleared by the EPA as a no-post-rinse required sanitizer that helps improve shelf life and reduce water consumption and expensive labor costs.

• Lead by example. If you want employees to follow proper food safety protocols, your food safety culture must start at the top, with leadership commitment that includes visible support and active involvement. Provide employees with clear role models who continuously demonstrate gold standard behaviors.

• Allocate proper resources to this effort. Earmark enough time, money, and resources to building your food safety culture. Ensure equipment is running well (e.g., walk-ins are consistently held at proper temperatures) to reduce food safety risks. Provide staff with the resources they need to maximize food safety—e.g., tech tools that indicate when equipment is malfunctioning, properly calibrated food thermometers, sanitizers and disinfectants that eliminate pathogens, etc.

• Recognize and reward employees. Praise employees for following food safety protocols, spotlight food safety employees of the month, and showcase high performers on your website and social media platforms. Provide small gifts, gift cards, and financial bonuses to employees that meet (or exceed) food safety goals. Showing appreciation for employees’ efforts will motivate them to continue.

• Integrate food safety culture into your corporate culture. Ensure that food safety efforts aren’t viewed in a “silo,” but are an important, integrated part of your brand, culture, and identity.

Every food safety practice that you implement—like requiring frequent handwashing, prohibiting employees from working when ill, ensuring that staff store foods safely and properly, etc.—is an important part of your food safety culture. But establishing (and maintaining) a positive food safety culture is more than these individual actions alone. It’s ensuring that food safety is baked into everything that your team does, and is an essential part of your employees’ mindset, attitudes, and values.