Achieving Excellence in Food Safety

The way food is produced and distributed in the modern world has been changing dramatically. Two main methods currently being used to reduce the risk of foodborne illness in the businesses are Inspections and education/training within the organisation, but education and training along does not produce good food safety culture. Therefore, changing employee behavior is critical for all food business operators. It is important to build an action-based food-safety management system that integrates food science and social-behavior.

The WHO statistics shows that each year 1.8 million people die globally because of food borne illnesses. Most of the cases are attributed to contaminated food or water. Surprisingly handling food safely can prevent most of such diseases.

Ever since the pandemic, the way customers look at food businesses changed. They now understand the hygiene requirements clearly. In other words, food safety culture has changed from “How are you doing when no-one’s watching” to “how are you doing when everyone’s watching”.

These are our tricks to achieve food safety excellence

A Food Safety Management System

It pretty much acts as a whole package that will take care of the contributing factors that tarn the safe food production, a basic Food safety management system, HACCP is believed to make positive impact. But ensure the system developed is applicable, usable, and relevant to your operations. HACCP analyses all the expected hazards in food, physical-chemical or microbiological and establishes a system that will prevent it from happening in various steps of the food flow. Advanced FSMS like ISO22000:2018 creates a much larger impact by contributing towards positive food safety culture and leadership. 

Design Elements

Most of the food safety drives towards operational hygiene and practices, but to make sure the food is produced and served in a right way by food handlers safely, the planning stage plays a major role.

Its like having the right equipment at right place. If you do not, that end up causing food safety risks and demotivating your food handlers to do their job right. Whenever designing your food outlets. Small, Medium, or Large; Always do a work session with the Engineering, Food and Beverage and Technical department because you would need their contributions to prevent poor space management and false equipment designs. Or Its best to leave that to a competent kitchen consultant that can help you to design food areas meeting needs and expectation of your internal and external interested parties. 

The food People

Food Handlers who runs the operations needs training. But only making them interactive, increases its effectiveness. Giving your people the right skills/knowledge based on your operations will help you to reduce food safety incidents, avoid cross-contaminations, reduce food waste, improve efficiency, promote a positive food safety culture, and build a positive reputation with your customers.

Develop and use new learning methods. Like E-learning and interactive talk sessions will improve the knowledge of the food handlers to use their skills and might change the behavior as well. 

Supply Chain

Starting from getting the supplies of food, beverages, and even packaging materials there must be a strong standard set and communicated to the providers. It is important to check the credibility of such vendors by keeping at least a minimum requirement to supply food to your operations. Such as a licence to trade/manufacture food, food safety management system in place can help you to access their standards. It is also good to have an external agency appointed to access the vendors and rate them if you have a larger food operation and less technical expertise. Correspondingly establishing a clear communication channel with the vendor and the business helps in the event of a product recall whether its due to manufacturing issues or any legal recalls initiated by authorities.

Strong Patners

Be proactive when choosing your partner. Whether its cleaning service provider, maintenance provider, pest control service provider or even training and audit service provider.

Each of these contributes heavily to the performance of the food safety management system.

• Chemical Supplier: use products that meet your operational needs and best to the industry standards. Ask for product usage compliance checks on a regular basis.
•  Pest control Service Provider: Use companies that offers IPM based pest control service. Never forget to define the scope clearly. Some uses latest smart solutions for pest monitoring and control.
•  Cleaning/Housekeeping Service Provider: Define the responsibilities and personal requirements clearly. Like skills, tools and quality of the service.
• Maintenance Service Provider: Commence a contract for taking care of the equipments on a regular basis. Have a plan executed and ensure it happening. This will prevent breakdowns and ensure safe food preparation.

Golden Rules

Establishing golden food safety rules and basic principle helps you to reduce the risk of unsafe and minimise the food foodborne diseases by choose foods processed for safety, cook food thoroughly, eat cooked food immediately, store food carefully. Reheat cooked food thoroughly, avoid contact between raw and cooked food, wash hands repeatedly, keep all kitchen surfaces clean, protect food from insect, rodent and other animal and use safe water, plus establish a recognition, and reward scheme of best food safety practices.

 WHO defines 5 keys to have a safe food establishment.

1. CLEAN : keep it clean;
2. SEPARATE : raw and cooked;
3. COOK : thoroughly;
4. HOLD : keep food at safe temperatures; and
5. RAW MATERIALS : use safe water and raw materials.

Traditionally, if you have these 5 elements assessed in your food safety management system, it eliminates most of the food safety hazards from your operations.

Engagement & Ownership

One of the key owners of ensuring food safety compliance, the authorities run many smart food safety initiatives to make sure all the food businesses from small scale to larger businesses understands the risk and take control effectively. The PIC program and FoodWatch by Dubai Municipality are a great example of how municipalities are becoming more transparent in inspections and ensuring full compliance. So, building a close relation with your local authorities and use of government platform are very important to ensure your food safety compliance and good authority engagement.

In addition to that make sure to agree on the responsibilities fairly. If the stakeholders do not take ownership of their actions that helps building the positive culture, all the efforts might get inadequate.

Innovation and Data Collection

Make sure there are clear instructions designed and available for the processes in operations and checklists are made as per the process. it is important to make it simple as possible. The long-complicated instructions are never read by anyone and most of the times it lives is a cupboard.

On the other hand, IOT based monitoring devices can be used if you want to go paperless for your checkpoints. Also use a smart auditing platform, like iAuditor that will help you to conduct internal food safety audits online. It provides various checklists pre-made for different types of businesses. Inspection Software & Mobile Inspection App - iAuditor by SafetyCulture

Talk to your team, customers, and your partners. The data you will get can be used develop your food safety management system. Talking to your customers is a great tool to understand your customer’s needs and expectations when it comes to food service. Some feedback can be critical to food safety, a flaw shows that there has been a breach in the control measures and its highly likely to happen again, unless you find it and stop it from happening again. Collect and analyze data of incidents, quality breaches or even at the event of non-conformances of inspections and audits.

Summary

The food and beverage industry has been kaleidoscopic with the customer needs. Likewise, its impact can be seen in the food and beverage offering across the regions as retail, manufacturing, restaurants, cafes and pop-up events or carnivals. Each of them brings various risks to food safety and if acted befittingly, it creates positive impact throughout the business by leaving guests with positive feedback.

 Having a food outlet in your business and unfamiliar with the requirements specifically to the food safety, could bring negative impact from customers and financial losses from legal fines. Some cases it might affect a larger group together leaving a much heavier impact on brand reputation.

But it’s not arduous task that requires too much technical knowledge. Most of the regulatory bodies and food safety communities has developed user friendly guidance documents that helps to manage it easily and effectively.

(www.foodsafe.ae & www.foodwatch.ae by Dubai Municipality provides such guidance documents to run the food operations safely)

Suraj Subramanian