FOOD HYGIENE CHECK IT OUT
In a food preparation environment, carrying out proper checks to ensure that the highest standards of food hygiene are met is essential. Dr. Martin Nash, Product Manager at Checkit, tells us why, and offers some words of caution to those that don’t implement regular checks.
Ensuring you meet food hygiene standards is a vital part of any catering operation. While this may seem obvious it is worth looking at the impact to a business if regular checks on hygiene are not carried out:
• Customers can become ill, leading to loss of business as news spreads. In extreme cases restaurants can be prosecuted or sued by diners.
• All businesses selling food are inspected and rated by local councils, recieving Food Hygiene Ratings. Failure to carry out regular hygiene checks, or the inability to provide records that show checks are carried out, can result in a low rating. In extreme cases restaurants that consistently fail to make improvements can be closed down – and the owners even jailed. Food Hygiene Ratings will influence whether customers choose your restaurant or café, meaning that low ratings will hurt your business.
• For larger chains of restaurants, food poisoning cases can dramatically impact the share price. In the US in 2015 shares in Chipotle dropped by 40% after a number of food poisoning cases were linked to its restaurants.
Given the importance of checking food hygiene, why is it still a problem that affects so many restaurants? There are five main reasons:
1
Many restaurants are still using paper-based checklists to monitor
operations. This leads to issues with missed checks, lost paper records, illegible records, increased time to carry out monitoring, and does not provide real-time oversight that they have actually been completed satisfactorily.
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Kitchens are busy places, with a lot going on. Ensuring that time is
set aside for food hygiene checks to be carried out can be difficult – and it needs to be done regularly if it is to be effective. Making sure that checks are recorded correctly and accurately is equally vital – local authorities will want to see documented processes and a full audit trail covering food hygiene if they are to provide a high rating.
3
Food safety should be at the heart of your culture. Lots of people are
involved in a catering operation, often working shifts which mean they can be operating unsupervised at certain times of day. Staff turnover can be high. It only takes a single slip – such as not wearing gloves or coming to work while ill, for food hygiene standards to be breached. It is recommended that restaurants therefore enforce a strong culture of food safety, emphasising the problems that will result if processes are not met.
4
Staff should be trained, with regular refresher courses to ensure that they
are carrying out checks correctly – and that they know what to do if checks fail and require corrective actions. For example, if food has to be cooked to a certain temperature, staff must be trained on what to do if checks show it is too cold. Otherwise the risk is that checks just become tick-box exercises, without an understanding of the consequences for overall food hygiene.
5
Enforcing standards is also time consuming for managers.
Inspecting and analysing completed food hygiene checklists can take 1-2 hours a day for a typical small catering business, on top of all the other duties a busy manager has to do.
For these reasons pen and paper- based monitoring is increasingly being replaced by digital technology.
“Food hygiene checks are vital to uncovering
potential problems before they develop into bigger issues. It is impossible to guarantee hygiene
standards, unless you have regular checks.”
The key point to note is that food hygiene checks are actually vital to uncovering potential problems before they develop into bigger issues. The complexity, range of ingredients, processes and equipment used within every restaurant means that it is impossible to guarantee hygiene standards, unless you have regular checks. Take a freezer unit that is malfunctioning and running too hot. A regular, scheduled monitoring check will uncover the problem, before potentially unsafe food stored in it is served to diners, safeguarding public health and your reputation. Ensure you have a strong food culture in place and train all staff to carry out regular food hygiene checks – your business success depends upon it.
www.checkit.net
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