12 Days of Food Safety

As we are now into the Holiday Season, here are my 12 Safe Food Days of Christmas. It would be naughty to not follow and review these with your team.

1 – Train/retrain/reinforce with all employee’s proper handwashing – Proper Handwashing is probably the best way to avoid spreading illness.

2 – Avoid cross contamination – follow proper hierarchy in storage. Don’t forget your line drawers!! Frequent violations are at line drawers.

3 – Double check proper temps when cooking. During busier times, foods may be taken out of the oven or grill too quickly because there are lots of tickets or there are lots of turkeys to cook.

4 – Review with all staff proper use of thermometers.

5 – Bare hand contact with Ready to Eat Foods – Naughty!!

6 – Reheating of foods must always be done within 2 hours or less, and must reach at least 165

7 – Reheated foods are one and done – One reheat cycle and then discard.

8 – Maintain proper cold holding temps. Your coolers and reachins may become overstuffed during this busier season. Do Not over order supplies – If you cannot safely hold the food, you will be blue.

9 – Chilling foods – The elves at the North Pole have it easy – just place foods in a snow bank! Review with your staff the proper ways of cooling foods that have foods go from 135 to 70 in 2 hours, then 70 to 41 in 4 more hours.

10 – Your kitchen elves should be keeping logs (not the fireplace kind) Maintaining logs is Nice, and it makes it easy to see when temps (cooling, hot or cold holding, sanitizer levels) are being Naughty, and need to be corrected.

11 – Use only food supplies from approved sources that properly handle foods. I wouldn’t trust anything left under the tree!

12 – As the manager – set the example!! The rules for safe food apply to all – I’ve seen managers handle foods or touch food surfaces with their bare hands. It seems to be OK because they are a manager, but the staff looks at the managers to set the example.

We hope all have a Great and Safe Holiday Season!!

To learn more detail about Food Safety procedures, or to set up an independent discounted audit of your facility, please contact Peter Bellisario of PeterBFoodSafetyAudits.com at peter@peterbfoodsafety.com  or (808) 491-7766. Check out my website –  www.PeterBFoodsafety.com

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