Food safety is perhaps the most important responsibility of any catering business. Whether you’re in a static venue, or feeding attendees at outdoor events, making certain that consumers don’t get ill is both an ethical and legal duty. The good news is that you have the ability to minimize risks by adopting some solid food hygiene best practices. With a little planning, you can enhance the quality of your product and keep diners safe.
Ingredient handling and storage
How staff handles and stores these ingredients affects various risks, including spoilage and cross-contamination. Therefore, it’s important to establish handling and storage procedures with a focus on several areas, including the following:
- Maintaining safe storage temperatures: Some foods—particularly raw meat and poultry—left in storage without sufficient temperature controls can be at risk of breeding pathogenic bacteria. Therefore, it is important to identify the correct temperatures for each ingredient and place them in relevant storage units. For instance, raw meats should not be stored at temperatures above 40°F.
- Separation: Having received deliveries of food, catering staff should follow effective separation procedures. Raw seafood, meat, eggs, and poultry should always be kept apart from other ingredients to prevent cross-contamination. This includes during storage, during food prep, and even using different chopping boards and utensils.
Remember, too, that the suppliers you choose have a role in maintaining safe storage and handling practices. When making choices of supply partners, ask representatives to provide you with full details of their safety procedures from acquisition to delivery. This enables you to ensure they are not only compliant with safety regulations but also align with your safety priorities.
Maintaining cleanliness
Keeping high cleanliness standards is a must when it comes to ensuring hygiene and quality in catering. It minimizes the potential spread of foodborne illnesses and maintains regulatory compliance. Not to mention that obvious cleanliness boosts your reputation among consumers.
Some basics to focus on here include:
Surface cleanliness
Rigorous surface cleaning protocols must be in place for all areas of your catering operations. Food preparation surfaces that aren’t kept clean can quickly enable microorganisms to breed. Therefore, they should be thoroughly cleaned between each step of the food preparation process. In addition, the kitchen area should be deep cleaned from top to bottom with disinfectants every three to six months.
Staff cleanliness
It’s also vital for your staff to keep high levels of personal hygiene at work. This must include washing their hands with soap and water between preparation tasks. They should always be wearing professional protective clothing over their street clothes, alongside hair nets and gloves to prevent contamination. Removing all jewelry—except a plain wedding band—is also essential to minimize places pathogens can breed and be transferred to food.
Training staff regularly
All your staff should receive initial training on hygiene and quality standards, regardless of their experience. While you might be relatively confident in the skills of staff, doing a little due diligence helps keep everyone safe. Sending your staff on food hygiene courses is a good start. It’s also important for experienced employees to supervise for a probationary period.
However, it’s important to remember that challenges, knowledge, and responsibilities change. Providing all your staff with regular refresher training helps improve safety compliance, increases awareness of hazards, and teaches useful skills. These updates should include reviewing day-to-day risk assessment processes, to ensure they can still spot safety issues and address them. Managing hazardous materials—like food waste and chemical disinfectants—is also a vital area to review, to mitigate cross-contamination issues.
Most importantly, talk through any Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) standards and other regulatory requirements related to their role. This is particularly salient if they’ve been promoted recently. Understanding their responsibilities helps them to make more informed decisions.
Prioritizing staff wellness
Unhealthy staff can present significant risks to food hygiene and quality. Particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, many caterers have a very clear understanding of how minimizing the bandwidth for illness reduces contamination hazards and boosts productivity.
In terms of physical wellness, make it clear to staff that anyone feeling unwell should not be in the workplace. While cooking food at correct temperatures may eliminate some respiratory viruses that make contact with ingredients, there is still a risk of spreading illnesses through contact with surfaces, alongside the usual airborne contaminant hazards. Therefore, requesting staff to stay home when ill is a more sensible approach.
You should also be mindful of your staff’s mental wellness. Workplace pressure and stress related to personal issues can affect job performance. It can disrupt workers’ time management abilities, which may lead to them implementing insufficiently long cooking or cleaning times. They may also become more easily distracted, leading to them making more mistakes and overlooking safe decision-making. It is, therefore, vital to have an open dialog with your staff about their psychological and emotional needs. Encourage them to set boundaries and priorities that help them manage the pressure.
