Article

It's time to break the pencil: What employees need to know about food safety

With multiple locations and an ever-changing labor force, how can restaurants be confident the food they sell is safe and that every employee is acting responsibly when it comes to food safety?

April 15, 2016

By John Sammon III, senior vice president and general manager of Intelligent Checklists, ParTech

Each year, an estimated 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die from foodborne disease. The process of preparing and serving food heavily revolves around individual human behaviors related to cooking, cleaning, handling, and refrigerating food. Completion of these processes is typically documented and maintained on paper logs with pen or pencil. When employees do not follow assigned processes and procedures, it can lead to accidental food-safety issues.

With multiple locations and an ever-changing labor force, how can restaurants be confident the food they sell is safe and that every employee is acting responsibly when it comes to food safety?

It's time for restaurants to "Break the Pencil" — the potential cause of the next foodborne illness outbreak.

Electronic and intelligent checklists and digital record-keeping are part of the solution and can manage and dynamically influence food safety processes by helping to eliminate human error.

To improve food safety, and preserve quality, all employees must know:

• The restaurant's Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plan
  
  Even if a restaurant is part of a chain, each location needs its own unique HACCP plan. The plan identifies potential hazards in any food-related processes where a lapse in attention or failure to complete a task could turn a potential food-safety hazard into an actual one and outlines preventative steps at critical control points. For example, identify how, when, where, and why salmonella or listeria could migrate into finished products and determine what preventative steps must be followed to reduce the hazards.

• How to accurately complete and document food-safety processes in accordance with the Food Safety Modernization Act
  
  The FSMA requires any location that handles food for public consumption to document and record actions of a larger food-safety plan, including ongoing monitoring of when a problem was spotted and corrective actions taken. Restaurants must maintain a proactive and efficient food safety culture and keep records for a minimum of two years, which digital devices make easy.

• How to properly manage time and temperature
  
  Cold foods should be maintained at 41 degrees or lower and hot foods need to be kept at 135 degrees or higher. Good record keeping is essential because biological agents can grow rapidly when food is left in between these two temperatures for more than four hours.

• Proper sanitation processes to destroy disease-causing pathogens
  
  Completely submersing items in water that is at least 171 degrees or using food service-grade chemicals, such as chlorine or iodine, according to manufacturers' recommendations, are effective sanitation processes to destroy pathogens. Digital solutions remind employees when it's necessary to sanitize equipment.

• How to prevent cross-contamination
  
  Dangerous food contaminants can easily spread from one person or surface to another food-contact surface. After sanitizing, clean surfaces must not come in contact with unsanitary surfaces. Real-time documentation of what has and has not been cleaned can help prevent cross-contamination.

• Individual work schedules and assigned checklists within the HACCP plan
  
  Employees play an important role in food safety and each must know his or her assigned tasks and complete them on time. Unlike paper-based monitoring, digital solutions proactively remind employees to complete tasks and prompt corrective actions when needed. With these reminders, more tasks are completed on time with fewer missed.

• Updated status of safety alerts and recalls
  
  With little downtime in kitchens, it is not feasible for an employee to constantly monitor for ingredient recalls. Through connectivity to the cloud, mobile and digital solutions can track relevant safety alerts and recalls, and immediately alert employees of potential problems.

• How to identify the source of an issue
  
  Digital solutions provide a detailed trail of completed food-safety procedures and the data collected can help quickly identify when and where a problem occurred so it can be fixed immediately.
   

While food safety is ultimately based on how people behave, wireless and cloud-based technologies can serve as more accurate, reliable and efficient systems for documenting completed processes. Handheld electronic systems are part of the solution for businesses to comply with new FSMA regulations and improve food-safety procedures. When implemented properly, these technologies can help turn food safety in a positive direction and potentially help avoid the next foodborne illness outbreak. When it comes to food safety compliance and verification, it's time to "Break the Pencil."