Restaurant food safety involves maintaining a clean work environment free of germs and other contaminants. When you are dealing with food, poor food safety means that you are putting your customers’ health at risk. Poor food safety can lead to food poisoning, stomach complaints, and other unpleasant symptoms involving the digestive tract. The following five best practices will help protect your customers from experiencing any unpleasant surprises.
Know Your State’s Food Safety Practices
Every state and county have specific food safety guidelines. Regular inspections ensure that your restaurant is as clean as possible and meets food safety standards. This keeps your patrons safe and healthy. Maintaining a clean restaurant is the ultimate goal of any establishment that serves quality food and beverages.
All Workers Must Use Proper Handwashing Techniques
Our hands touch surface after surface all day long. We touch our faces and spread germs everywhere we touch. The best way to keep germs from spreading is to wash your hands frequently. Every time you use the restroom, change cooking tasks or clean a table or cooking surface, it’s important that you wash your hands. If you handle money or pick something up off the floor, use hand sanitizer.
Follow the 2-Hour Rule
The 2-hour rule is essential when it comes to food safety. Many foods are fine when left out at room temperature for long periods of time. Other foods like dairy products and meats will spoil rather quickly. The 2-hour rule means that highly perishable items should be thrown away after two hours. Even though the items may still look fresh, bacteria have been growing and are invincible to the naked eye. As soon as the 2-hour mark hits, it’s time to remove the items from the serving area.
Separate Raw Foods from Cooked Foods
Raw foods can contaminate cooked foods. Store and prepare raw foods in a different area of the kitchen from where you store and prepare cooked foods. Raw chicken carries many harmful types of bacteria that can be passed on to cooked foods. Wash your hands any time you work with raw food to prevent transferring germs from one place to another. Keeping raw foods away from cooked foods is one of the best food safety practices for you to follow when you own a restaurant.
Train and Monitor Employees
All restaurant staff should have some type of training. Servers and cooks especially should have training on how to properly handle food during every stage of the food preparation process. State food safety guidelines require regular checks on both the credentials of the server as well as monitoring how they perform their job. Keeping your staff up-to-date on their training and monitoring how they perform each task is part of running a safe and productive restaurant.
Learning about food safety practices is an important part of working in the food service industry. Meanwhile, it pays to have adequate restaurant insurance in place to protect your business from potential claims. Contact our experts at RMS Insurance Brokerage, LLC to get started on your tailored restaurant insurance policy today!