Restaurant Food Handling: The Do’s and Don’ts

What is cooking in your commercial kitchen today? And how safe is it for human consumption?

If you’re not 100% sure, you may want to supervise your food handlers more closely.

Otherwise selling unsafe food will tarnish your food business reputation. Not to mention causing food poisoning to your customers.

Not exactly what you had in mind for your business, right? It is not always easy enforcing discipline and getting your food handlers to follow food safety and hygiene best practices. Neither is it far-fetched. But you should be consistent. Of which you need a follow-through strategy. Here are a few ways:

• Organize in-house refresher training
• Encourage your staff to attend courses run by industry associations
• Incentivize them to complete an online food safety training course

And then share these do’s and don’ts for food handlers with your team. It will help jog their memory about which practices to follow and which mistakes to avoid.

What Are the Safe Food Handling Practices?

All food businesses should comply with the Singapore’s Food Safety Standards. It’s all about making sure the food is uncontaminated before a customer consumes it.

In broad terms, you should keep the following food handling practices in check. Make sure:

• You acquire food from trusted food sources
• Your food is stored and prepared safely
• Your food handlers adhere to personal hygiene rules

Abiding by these rules will keep you safe from hefty fines and also help you grow your business.

Now, let’s dive right in. We’ll first look at food safety tips to practice in your commercial kitchen before we get down to some more common mistakes you’d rather avoid.

1. Remind Your Food Handlers to Adhere to Good Hand Washing Practices

You might want to rethink your hand washing compliance strategy.

Here is what the Singapore Government reported in the year 2018 “In the first 10 months of this year, MOH received 271 notifications of food poisoning incidents, involving a total of 1,768 cases. In the same period last year, MOH got 272 notifications of food poisoning incidents involving 1,265 cases.”

With such statistics each year, there’s a very real chance that your establishment might suffer from a food poisoning incident.

But there is a solution.

For starters, make sure you do your part and create an environment conducive to good hand hygiene.

• Provide easily accessible hand washing facilities at your food premises.
• Ensure these wash stations are dedicated solely to washing hands, arms and face.
• Provide your hand wash stations with warm running water and soap.
• Fit out every wash station with conspicuous signage to remind your staff when and how to wash their hands.
• Make hand drying facilities readily available at each hand washing station.

Now:

Some guidelines advise against the use of air dryers in food preparation areas as the air that is blown from them can cross-contaminate food and working surfaces. Whereas in fact, single-use towels are set apart as the most effective hand drying alternative.

And whichever option you settle on, paper or cloth, it will do the job. However, if you opt for non-disposable towels and don’t want your staff to contaminate the food with them, you’ll have to wash them frequently. Often too frequently.

You will find Alsco Singapore’s paper hand towels and dispensers useful. Here are their sizes:

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Alsco Dispenser

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Paper Hand Towels

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But that’s not all.

You’re still stuck with explaining to your kitchen staff how important it is for them to practice proper hand washing technique. This one can get a bit tricky since the frenetic atmosphere of restaurant kitchens can get your staff to cut corners.

Make things clear. They should NEVER sacrifice a customer’s health and their establishment’s image on account of a time shortage. Instruct them to wash hands with soap and running water whenever there’s a risk of contamination.

Truth is, 20 seconds is not that much.

2. Keep Your Utensils and Surfaces Clean

It’s next to impossible to keep food hygienic at your eatery if you’re reckless about the cleanliness of your surfaces and equipment.

Your food professionals need to be acutely aware of best hygiene practices that will keep microbes at safe levels. This is especially important when handling raw meat that can contaminate other food and work surfaces.

So, it’s critical to train your team to constantly clean food contact surfaces.

Remind them to:

• Use warm water and soap or small amounts of bleach to clean food preparation surfaces.
• Clean utensils such as cutting boards, plates and thongs with warm soapy water.

In fact, you can make the process much easier for everyone if you manage workflows with these precautions in mind. It will save you unnecessary cleaning time. Try organizing it in such a way so that you:

• Handle your raw meats first, clean the worktop and utensils and then transition to other tasks.
• Have dedicated cutting boards for handling raw meat.
• Use a separate set of tongs for raw and cooked meat (when grilling food).

Fairly easy set of rules to follow in any commercial kitchen, right?

3. Keep Foods Out of Temperature Danger Zones

If left unattended for long periods of time food gets susceptible to spoilage. It’s simple. You want to keep your dishes out of the time known as the “Danger Zone”, i.e. when bacteria is most likely to breed.

To illustrate, leave, let’s say, your pork tenderloin at a temperature between 5°C and 60°C. What you’re risking is that the bacteria count in your dish doubles in as little as 20 minutes.

This is the danger zone you want to keep avoiding with the rest of your meals as well.

Keeping food at the wrongs temperatures is one of the most common culprits for a foodborne illness outbreak. And that’s the last thing you want at your establishment, right?

Ensure you store your food at the right temperature, keeping to the general rule of thumb:

• Don’t leave food unrefrigerated for more than two hours.
• If the temperature goes above 32°C, don’t keep the food unrefrigerated for more than one hour.

To top it off, your commercial kitchen staff should know how to treat hot and cold foods. Here are some general guidelines to go by:

• Keep hot food hot. Ensure your cooked food stays at or above 60°C. The most practical way to do this is to serve food immediately. In case you’re catering for an event or you’re serving cooked food at a buffet, make sure to keep it at safe temperatures. Store cooked food in chafing dishes, warming trays, or preheated steam tables.
• Keep cold food cold. Keep cold dishes, such as egg salads, sushi and desserts at or below 4°C. Put them away in the fridge, place it on ice or freeze it.
• Cool hot foods within two hours. Let’s say you’re preparing large amounts of a broth that you plan on using for different dishes later on. Make sure you divide the broth into different containers so they cool more quickly before you refrigerate it.
• Use a thermometer when reheating food. Make sure to keep the internal temperature at around 73°C.

Watch this video for more insights;