More responsibility and awareness might be coming for restaurant managers based on information coming out of the 10th Annual Nation’s Restaurant News Food Safety Symposium.
At the symposium future additions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Model Food Code were speculated in detail by food safety experts including Miriam Eisenberg of EcoSure.
The Food Code is updated every four years, but may include yearly supplements in between updates if needed. The latest update was released in 2013.
Eisenberg believes that we’ll see a requirement that a certain number of managers be certified by an American National Standards Institute accredited program in food safety knowledge. She envisions restaurant managers being the front line when a regulatory agency walks in the door asking questions. Managers will be required to provide more information about the understanding of monitoring for foodborne illness in their operations.
More and more the food safety initiatives that were mostly focused on manufacturing are creeping their way into the retail restaurant industry to help battle foodborne illness outbreaks.
Here’s an excerpt from an NRN.com article on the 2015 supplement:
The 2015 Food Code supplement talked about managers needing to be able to verify and monitor cooking temperatures, holding temperatures, hot and cold, and cooling temperatures, she said, but is not particularly clear about how they are to do that. Eisenberg said her group is a strong believer in checklists, but such changes will require more checklists and training people to do more checklists and then monitoring the checklists.
This goes right along with what we are preaching every day at OpsAnalitica. You need to be doing daily checklists and following up on them consistently to ensure they are being done diligently, either through exception reporting and/or coaching sessions. This is the only way to know that you are running safe operations and that the most important things in your operations are being checked frequently.
Click here to watch a recording of our webinar, Setting Up An In-House Inspection Program.