Tips for Establishing a Restaurant Food Safety Program

Food safety is about more than reducing foodborne illness. It’s also about quality assurance. The primary goal of your restaurant’s food safety plan is to ensure quality by keeping the food you serve safe. The first step is to develop standard operating procedures (SOP) that address how you will control the most common risk factors responsible for foodborne illness.

In this post, we’ll look at 4 essential safety procedures which are maintaining a sanitary kitchen, preventing cross contamination, encouraging good personal hygiene, and monitoring temperature.

Maintaining a Sanitary Kitchen

Perhaps more than any other SOP, maintaining a sanitary kitchen is imperative for reducing surface pathogens to safe levels.  Simple steps you can take at little to no cost include:

• Cleaning and sanitizing all work surfaces, equipment, and utensils after each task
• Moving food waste to the trash quickly and carefully
• Keeping your preferred sanitizing supplies readily available for staff
• Cleaning floors before food handling to prevent floor debris from settling on workstations
• Storing mops, buckets, and other cleaning equipment off the floor to deter pests

Preventing Cross-Contamination

Pathogens can be spread easily from one piece of equipment to another. Fortunately, you can prevent the threat of cross-contamination with a few easy fixes:

• Separate equipment by food type.  Prepare and handle each type of food with a separate piece of equipment. For example, use one set of cutting boards, utensils and containers for raw poultry, another set for raw meat, and a third set for produce.

• Code equipment by color. Color code each set of kitchen equipment to make it visually easy to keep them apart. Green typically is used for fruits and vegetables; red for red meat; yellow for poultry; and blue for fish. Sanitize each set of equipment separately.

• Train staff on proper use of specialty equipment. Demonstrate to the kitchen staff how to properly use and clean tools such as meat slicers and food processors. Visually inspect all kitchen equipment daily. Don’t forget the ice machines!

Encouraging Good Personal Hygiene

To lessen the possibility of food handlers contaminating food, institute a personal hygiene program that addresses handwashing, attire, and illness.

• Handwashing: Remind employees to wash their hands frequently, especially after using the restroom and after handling raw meat, seafood, and poultry. Ensure they dry their hands with a single-use paper towel or hand dryer, rather than any part of their uniform. 

• Attire: Require staff leaving food prep areas to remove their aprons and single-use gloves. Stock multiple glove sizes and outline occasions that merit putting on a new pair of single-use gloves, such as handling ready-to-eat food. Create rules for the proper use of hair restraints as well as a list of prohibited jewelry.

• Illness: Emphasize the importance of coming to work in good health. Explain how the spread of germs from sick staff to customers puts the restaurant at great risk. Put in place policies such as reporting illness, covering wounds, and practicing safe kitchen behaviors. Don’t penalize your employees for calling out sick from work; it’s better to be safe than sorry!

Monitoring Temperature

Foods that are hot should stay hot. Foods that are cold should stay cold. Raw foods should be cooked to the proper temperature to destroy pathogens. Common knowledge at a restaurant, perhaps, but what measures do you have in place that you can rely on 100%?

To best monitor temperatures, you should institute hazard prevention methods such as:

• Thermometers
• Thermocouples
• Line checks
• Temperature monitoring devices
• Intuitive Systems

To guarantee 24-hour monitoring, consider automatic temperature collectors for:

• Walk-in freezers / refrigerators
• Stand-alone freezers / refrigerators
• Ovens
• Makelines
• Ambient environments
• Cold chain storage and transport

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