Easing the Burden of Food Safety for Your Restaurant Staff
Alleviate the stress on your team by building a food safety culture
Promoting safety within your kitchen and front-of-house staff is just one aspect of running your own restaurant, and while it is a priority, keeping everyone in your establishment safe needs to be top of mind, too. With the USDA currently estimating an average of 48 million cases of foodborne illness each year, keeping your customers as safe and healthy as your team members can be a lot to manage.
Thankfully, keeping safety top of mind isn’t difficult for your average restauranteur, but it’s not the only thing fighting for first place in your attention span. Food and beverage management covers a lot of ground, from ever-evolving food preferences and trends to safety precautions and staffing calculations, it’s no small order. But whether you’re running a small boutique cafe or a fleet of franchises, much of this safety burden can be lifted with a few mindset changes — and a little help from digital solutions.
Clear and Comprehensive Training and SOPs
The first step in your fight against foodborne illnesses is setting a safety standard that your entire team knows well, and keeps in their minds during every shift. Your best bet in the battle for food safety is having clearly defined standard operating procedures (SOPs) and detailed training for every member of your team. This should include your front-of-house team as well as your kitchen staff, as food safety is everyone’s responsibility.
Starting with detailed training is only the beginning, and shouldn’t be treated as a “one-and-done” process. Keeping your team up to date with the latest in food safety trainings, as well as discussions around trending illnesses and food recalls, can reinforce the information your crew members initially learned. The easiest way to keep all this information readily available for your team, and to accurately track who’s completed it, is to use a digital training platform. Learning Management Systems (LMS) are great for sending out updated training and health warnings to your team members, and being able to keep an audit-worthy record of who has completed it, and when.
Additionally, an online training system that links with your restaurant management software can ease that burden even further. An intranet or employee portal for all your training to be housed can also keep up-to-date copies of all SOPs available on every team member’s device. Look for systems that are either built for restaurants, making it easy to integrate with your POS and scheduling systems, as well as platforms that offer an open API for easier integrations. Integrating all your digital paperwork into a single system means it’s easy to keep track of all detailed employee records, and ensure everyone’s trainings are completed in a timely manner.
“In addition to behavior-based training, continuous and refresher training is critical in maintaining good food handler knowledge and behavior.”
Regular Inspections and Digital Monitoring Tools
Nobody loves a surprise inspection, and typically your local agencies are going to give you some warning when they’ll be stopping by for a health or sanitation inspection. Unscheduled inspections, however, can give you better insight into the day-to-day happenings in your facility. When you self-conduct surprise inspections on your team, you gain the unique opportunity to see how your team is functioning every day, highlight areas of improvement, and note successes - all while keeping an internal record of how your teams are progressing.
Keeping your team informed that inspections are regular, and while they may not be reported to outside agencies for review, they can help encourage a food safety culture throughout your entire business. Health and safety, especially concerning foodborne illnesses, take a village to execute well, and when everyone is aware that food safety and sanitation measures are being watched at all times, it can help everyone step up to the challenge.
As a restaurant owner, you likely already have your hands full without conducting routine inspections, and the idea of adding more to your very full plate may sound daunting, but thankfully, new technology can help ease that burden. Digital monitoring tools that can routinely run temperature checks on your lines and food storage areas can mean an end to the manual temp check process. Additionally, sanitation and line checks traditionally handled with paper forms can be upgraded to a digital form process that streamlines the process for your team. The best digital forms platforms will also make it easy to keep inventory tracking, upcoming menu needs, and even supplier and freight shipments available for review whenever you need them - without the need to hunt for missing or damaged paperwork.
Allergen Awareness and Emergency Response Plans
While your existing safety training may feel comprehensive for sanitation standards, not enough training focuses on the importance of understanding allergen awareness. With an estimated 30,000 allergen-related emergencies occurring each year, it’s safe to say that there’s still a lot to be done about understanding and preventing food allergy emergencies. Many of these emergencies can be prevented, but it comes down to your entire team doing their part. Whether it’s your back-of-house staff minimizing cross-contamination risks, or your serving staff asking your customers proactive questions about food allergies, everyone can help. Keeping your team mindful of allergens may feel like it’s adding more to their already busy schedule, but you can lessen the added pressure by making it a part of their daily routine. In the long run, learning to proactively ask about food allergies can end up saving your team time by preventing re-makes and emergencies.
“Many food allergic reactions occur in restaurants, and one in three people with food allergies report having a reaction in a restaurant. Understanding restaurant practices to address food allergies and what food workers know about them can help reduce the risk of food allergic reactions in restaurants.”
Of course, no allergy-prevention method is entirely fool-proof, and having a set plan of action in the case of any number of emergencies can also help your team keep a level head and increase the likelihood of a positive outcome. This doesn’t just apply to allergens, however, and can also be applied to other emergency situations such as severe or sudden storms (especially for patio diners), kitchen fires, and power outages. In the case of emergencies, make sure your entire team is well-versed in knowing how to address the situation. This can include having an alert system within your kitchen, well-placed fire extinguishers, a standard plan for keeping refrigeration units at the coolest possible temperatures, and making sure at least one of your shift members is trained in CPR or other emergency response techniques.
Employee Feedback and Involvement
Adding more safety precautions and training may sound like it’s only adding to the burden of your team, but the ability to streamline these processes and make it a part of a bigger food safety culture goes a long way in keeping stress off your team. The most important thing you can do to ease the burden of food safety challenges is to make it an ongoing, two-sided conversation with all your team members. Your kitchen and serving staff will be the ones with the best insight into potential health and safety risks, so make sure that they know your restaurant is a safe place to voice those concerns.
Something as simple as a conversation around handwashing stations can make or break your food safety efforts, but your staff will know where they’re needed the most as they’re the ones running the day-to-day operations within your facility. Think of your expo line, for example. This is a place where people will be going from touching plates to paper tickets, or multiple utensils and different foods for different tables. Ensuring a handwashing station is available can minimize the risk of food cross-contamination and encourage team members to wash their hands more frequently. Additionally, implementing a digital read-out for your upcoming orders can help your expo team keep their hands off paper tickets while still being able to call out for dishes or food runners.
Building a culture around food safety can’t be solely an effort coming from the top down. It has to involve everyone on your team. Work with your employees to implement policies that support health screenings and discourage sick employees from coming to work. Additionally, keep everyone involved in safety discussions. When starting shifts, let all team members know specials for the day or week, allergen risks, current safety initiatives, and create a discussion around potential safety hazards. Continually ask for feedback from your team - safety is the responsibility of everyone in the restaurant, but it’s your responsibility to make sure that your team feels comfortable voicing concerns and making suggestions.
About GoFormz
GoFormz is a digital forms solution that helps bring your data into a single, actionable place. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms online and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. No matter what your restaurant needs, GoFormz is ready to bring your processes to the digital realm. Complete with an open API and multiple native integrations, you can rest assured that your data is always ready, whenever you need it.
