Building Food Safety into Your Culture
We talk a lot about food safety over here at Trail. Likely because it’s an issue that stands out among hospitality businesses of all shapes and sizes. From restaurants to takeaways, pubs and bars, coffee shops or bakeries, these businesses all need to maintain high food safety standards to pass audits and provide great customer experiences.
A recent article in QSR Magazine, The Anatomy of an Effective Food Safety Program, discusses many elements of what it takes to build food safety right into your company culture. The author talks about:
- How food safety needs to have top-down buy-in without making teams at the site level feel like big brother is watching
- How taking a positive approach to food safety through the building of good habits creates a better relationship between site teams and management
- The frequency and depth of in-house audits
- Collecting and effectively using data from audits to improve your food safety program and culture
- How to hold sites accountable when they fall behind the brand standards
- Conducting regular self-assessments of your sites and making sure your food safety program is keeping up with shifting food safety needs
Here at Trail, we’ve talked about how building daily habits is the future of audits and how you look at food safety in your business is a huge element that drives the customer experience (be it good or bad).
In order to implement a successful food safety program, you need to move beyond the “because I told you to” mentality when delivering food safety guidelines from operations to the site level. Each of your sites needs the autonomy to get their jobs done, while still following the program laid out by head office, and that can be complicated.
On the flip side, the author of the QSR Magazine article seems to have it out for checklists and “checklist culture”. And we see his point.
“Wait, isn’t Trail a checklist app?” you might say. Yup, Trail is an app that uses checklists to deliver operational guidelines down to the site level, but it’s so much more than a series of checklists pinned to a board.
See, Trail is also a two way conversation. It’s not just an operations manager handing down a checklist and hoping for the best. The ability to add data entry points and converse about tasks and lists right within the app creates a culture of openness between head office and sites, creating a sense of accountability without that “big brother” feeling.
Even better, you have access to realtime data as checklists are completed, comments made and photos uploaded. Trail makes it so easy to see which sites are really nailing food safety (and other business priorities) and which sites could use a little more help.
And the best part? It works. For example, Tossed, a brand that has chosen Trail to establish and maintain high operational and food safety standards, has saved themselves 648 hours of audits per annum and reduced their head office overheads by 10%.
Vincent McKevitt, Founder of Tossed
We agree that the old way of doing checklists was a bit tired and ineffective. That’s why Trail was created. When done right, checklists can be the answer to building food safety straight into your company culture, passing audits with less time and effort, and creating an environment of positivity and daily habit building for your teams.
Want to see how Trail can do all that? Watch the video or book a demo.
