Restaurant Food Safety – 5 Tips for Practicing Proper Food Safety
As a restaurant owner or food manager, ensuring that the customers are safe and healthy should be the top priority. Therefore, one of the most critical aspects of running a successful restaurant is practicing proper restaurant food safety. Failing to do so can result in foodborne illnesses, legal issues, and damage to your restaurant’s reputation.
Restaurant Food safety involves preventing food from becoming contaminated with harmful pathogens, chemicals, or other substances. It includes everything from storing and preparing food properly to maintaining a clean and hygienic kitchen environment.
This blog will discuss five essential tips for practicing proper restaurant food safety in your restaurant. By following these tips, you can minimize the risk of foodborne illnesses, maintain compliance with food safety regulations, and keep your customers happy and healthy. So let’s get started!
Restaurant Food Safety Checklist Every Food Manager Should Know
A food safety checklist is a great way to ensure you follow the proper procedures for storing and serving food. You should use this list in addition to your standard daily routine, especially if you have a busy restaurant or are responsible for managing multiple locations.
Make Sure Your Staff is Practicing Good Hygiene
- Make sure your staff is practicing good hygiene. For example, staff should wash their hands with soap and water before starting work and wear hairnets and gloves when handling food. They should also not eat or drink while working in the kitchen and wash their hands after using the restroom.
- Make sure everyone’s appearance is clean. Dirty, greasy, soiled clothing will make customers go away. Appearance is very important.
- Keep used utensils separate from clean ones (and vice versa). It's essential to keep your utensils separated by use — dirty ones in one bin, clean ones in another — so you know what type to use with certain foods. In addition, this will help prevent cross-contamination between items that aren't supposed to be eaten together (like meat with vegetables).
Avoid Cross-Contamination
- Avoid cross-contamination by washing hands, utensils, and surfaces often.
- Wash your hands before handling food.
- Use separate cutting boards and knives for raw meat and vegetables.
- Keep raw foods away from cooked/ready-to-eat foods.
Focus on the Health of Your Staff
The health of your staff is an essential part of maintaining restaurant food safety. If a staff member is sick, he or she must know the symptoms of common foodborrne illnesses to make sure they are not a risk. If they are diagnosed with a foodborne illness they should only come back to work once a doctor has cleared them.
Encouraging your staff to stay home if they are feeling ill is important. Not only can sick employees pass their illnesses on to customers, but they can also contaminate food and surfaces in the restaurant.
The best way to keep everyone healthy is by practicing proper hand-washing techniques throughout the day — especially before handling food items. Your employees should also avoid sharing utensils (or even touching their own faces) because this could transfer bacteria from one person’s hands onto another’s food item without them even realizing it!
Sanitize Frequently to Maintain Restaurant Food Safety
It’s important to sanitize your equipment frequently, especially if you have a lot of customers. Make sure that you sanitize before and after every shift. Have a dedicated person responsible for cleaning and sanitizing everything in the kitchen and wiping down tables and counters.
Ensure that your staff has adequate time and resources to properly clean and sanitize all restaurant areas, including prep areas, utensils, and equipment.
It’s also essential to ensure that all employees know how important it is to wash their hands throughout the day and night. You can’t be too careful when it comes to keeping food safe; there are many bacteria around us, especially in restaurants where people eat out often. So being extra cautious about washing hands will help keep everyone healthy!
Train Your Staff
It’s one of the most critical steps in maintaining a safe restaurant environment. Of course, as a restaurant owner or manager, you know that your business relies on providing safe food to customers. But did you know the key to restaurant food safety is not just about what happens in your kitchen? It’s also about how well you train employees in safe practices and procedures.
That’s why AAA Food Handler offers an online Restaurant food safety training program, which is 100% online, accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week (no more waiting for an instructor). And it’s affordable — you can get certified quickly and easily without breaking the bank.
We hope this article has helped give you a better understanding of the importance of restaurant food safety in restaurants. You shouldn’t take it lightly if you’re serving customers eating out at your place because they want something healthy or tasty!
We know how hard it can be to keep up with all the rules while running a business and keeping your customers happy simultaneously — but our online training prevents possible breaks in food safety hazards and eliminate complaints from unhappy customers.
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