5 Tips to Improve Your Food Safety

1 Use Disposable Gloves Properly

The first food safety tip that is having disposable gloves at the ready, and using them properly. In order to reduce the risk of making people sick and maintaining GMPs,, disposable gloves are used in many processes. All employees who are in direct contact with all food related processes should be wearing gloves.

To use the gloves properly, employees need to change the gloves they are wearing often. This helps reduce the chances of cross-contamination and microbial issues.

New glove are required:

• if they become contaminated (ie touching an unclean surface)

• if they tear

• when switching between handling raw and ready-to-eat foods

• when changing tasks

• after taking out the trash or other possible contaminants

• after sweeping, mopping and cleaning

• after handling money of any kind

2 FIFO, FEFO, and Expiration Dates

Because many foods are perishable, it’s important to monitor expiration dates and understand stock rotation of food products. The goal is to produce products with the longest possible shelf life for the consumer and retail. First In First Out (FIFO) or First Expiring First Out (FEFO) systems help make sure that older products are used before newer ones.

The FIFO/FEFO procedure follows 5 simple steps:

1. Locate products or ingredients with the soonest best before or use-by dates.
2. Remove items that are past these dates or are damaged.
3. Place items or ingredients with the soonest dates at the front.
4. Stock new items behind the front stock; those with the latest dates should be at the back.
5. Use/sell stock or ingredients at the front first.

If there is a question of whether you should serve something, it’s better to throw it out then risk a customer getting sick or causing a recall.

3 Cross-contamination

The next food safety tip is something that we touched on earlier, cross-contamination. Cross-contamination happens when cooked or ready-to-eat food comes into contact with raw food, allergens, or objects that are contaminated by the two.

Raw foods have a higher chance to contain bacteria, which causes food poisoning, and is the reason that raw and ready to eat (RTE) foods are stored separately.

Allergens are labeled on every retail food package and specify the allergens that the package contains. It’s very important that this label is correct and doesn’t contain any additional allergens that are unlabeled.

The most frequent reason for recall in the US is cross-contamination, which includes mis-labeling or not declaring a food ingredient on the package.

4 Keep an Eye on the Temperature

Another important food safety tip is to keep an eye on the temperature. It’s important to keep food out of the temperature danger zone, between 5 °C and 60 °C (40°F and 140°F). Bacteria grow quickly in the temperature danger zone and some foods are high-risk than others.

Industry standards dictate how much time food can spend in the danger zone. Food must be cooled to 21°C (70°F) within 2 hours and 4 more hours to get down to 4.5°C (40°F). When warming foods, the same rules apply in reverse, 4 hours to get to 21°C (70°F), then 2 hours to get up to hot holding.

5 Promote hand washing

The last food safety tip that we are going to talk about may sound very obvious, but is never the less important. Hand washing may be one of the most important food safety rules out there. It’s important to not only wash after visiting the restroom but also before starting any work related to food at all.

One of the best ways to promote hand washing is to have dedicated hand-washing stations that are easily accessible to employees. It’s also a good idea- and a legal requirement- to have signs not only reminding employees to wash their hands, but also reminding them of the steps to washing their hands.

The steps to properly wash hands:

• Wet hands with warm water

• Apply soap

• Lather well for least 20 seconds scrubbing all surfaces

• Rinse well with warm water

• Dry hands with a clean towel

QWerks’ goal is to improve food safety and quality in all manufacturing environments and provide a means for teams to work more efficiently. Learn more about what QWerks does for food companies.