Food Safety Spotlight: 10 Tricks to Clean Up Your Restaurant Now

As Chipotle attempts to draw attention away from their brand’s recent debacle, it’s hard not to want to revisit the issue that brought them to the forefront of the industry’s attention over the past year. It just seems like no matter how many new concepts they try out or free burritos they give away, they can’t distract from their brand’s failures. And as they continue to make news for putting employees and customers in harm’s way, they’re giving their customers more and more reasons to distrust the brand.

The Importance of Food Safety

While Chipotle has become the most recent face of food safety fails, they are far from alone. In recent studies conducted by the Environmental Health Specialists Network, they sought to uncover and better understand why these food contaminations continue to happen in restaurants around the country.

These are just some of the startling facts that came out of the studies:

• Over 50% of workers didn’t wear gloves when handling food about to be served to customers.
• In the last year, 5% of workers worked even though they were sick with vomiting or diarrhea.
• Roughly 25% of workers failed to wash their hands regularly.

With the horrifying realization that there are way too many restaurant workers who violate good food safety practices, it’s time for restaurant managers and operators to take action. In honor of National Food Safety Month, let’s set the wheels in motion now.

Prioritizing Food Safety

What reason do you need to prioritize food safety in your restaurant?

• Keep your customers safe. This may seem obvious, but it’s clear that a lot of restaurant workers aren’t taking this into consideration.
• Keep your brand’s reputation intact. This, of course, will only become a problem if your failure to uphold proper food safety practices sickens your customers.
• Keep better control over your operations. If you can’t crack down on proper food handling and preparation behaviors and processes in the BOH, you have to ask yourself where else your operations failing.

If you’ve worked in the restaurant industry for some time, you know that food safety best practices aren’t just about washing hands and checking meat temperatures. There is a lot more that goes into it than that. The following list will help you evaluate where your restaurant stands and determine where you need to fill in the gaps:

Food safety training should be a healthy part of any restaurant worker’s educational experience — not just when they’re being introduced to your operations either. Food safety training should be regularly enforced.

Color-coding can be a big help in ensuring that kitchen tools (like cutting boards) are used for correct food preparation purposes. The same goes for containers that include possible allergens.

Personal hygiene practices are often at the root of many food contamination problems, so there need to be more and regular reminders to staff about how to maintain this. Management should also do random spot-checks.

Table and equipment sanitization techniques should be taught to all employees and monitored by management on a regular basis. And, when possible, less harmful cleaning products should be used.

Employee sick leave policies should be in place to cover employees in the case that they do fall ill and are in no condition to work.

Pest control might not be the most common solution to this problem, but it can only help to make your kitchen a cleaner and safer environment.

Meat preparation can be a huge problem for restaurants. If meat is left out to thaw for too long, if temperature logs aren’t used, if an expiration date isn’t closely checked… all of these could possibly lead to a foodborne illness.

Self-inspections might seem yet like another task you have to add to your growing list of responsibilities, but this will teach your staff to be prepared for anything — including keeping your food safe to consume.

Regulatory requirements don’t usually change too often, but it’s still important to review these regularly and should become a part of your employees’ training, too.

Cloud-based software can improve the process of regulating, monitoring, and enforcing food safety in your restaurant.

If there’s anything to be learned from the Chipotle food contaminations, it’s that food safety fails can happen even to the best and most well-known of restaurant brands. Nevertheless, that shouldn’t mean you need to handle the recovery as poorly as they did.

How to Recover Guests in the Case of a Food Safety Failure

There are a number of key steps required when attempting to recover a guest from a poor dining experience. Food contamination is a different beast though. When trying to save a guest who has been soured on your restaurant after you failed to protect them, you’ll need to invest more energy and work into the recovery process.

1. Give your customers plenty of opportunity to vent — in person, online, or in private. If something happened, you’ll want them to speak up.
2. In the case of a food safety fail, escalate to corporate immediately.
3. Document all of the details of the food safety fail in your guest engagement and recovery platform.
4. Make sure you monitor all communication channels closely, at all times, to see if anyone else has fallen ill.
5. Provide a timely response to the sickened customers.
6. Accept full ownership for the food contamination, don’t try to pass the buck, and issue a genuine apology.
7. Be very careful in how you respond and make sure the messaging is consistent with how you’re explaining the issue and resolution to media.
8. Provide appropriate compensation (this is where something like liability insurance could come in handy). Do not offer them a free meal.
9. Take steps internally to address your food safety failures.

At the end of the day, the key to keep your restaurants (and brand) safe is to develop an internal process that will cover all your bases, from implementing food safety best practices all the way through to recovering a guest in the case of a fail.