Foodborne illnesses are a major cause of illness in the United States. According to the CDC, 48 million people suffer from a foodborne illness every year. If you want to ensure optimal health for your visitors, you need to create a culture of food safety at your restaurant.

Yet how can you inculcate this culture into your staff’s daily lives? What changes do you need to make?

In this guide, we’ll look at how you can foster a food safety culture in your restaurant with some simple food safety tips and guidance. Ready to learn more? Then read on!

Practice What You Preach

If you want your staff to take food safety seriously, you need to take it seriously too. A restaurant workplace can be hot and stressful: if your staff see that you’re ignoring food safety regs (for instance, by not wearing gloves while touching raw chicken), they could decide to ignore it.

You’re never too high-ranking to follow food safety tips. To put it another way, you’re never too high-ranking to escape the consequences of a health code violation.

Make Sure Your Staff Know the Rules

If you don’t explain the new rules clearly enough, your staff are less likely to take them on board. If you want to drive the point home, you could create a list of rules and stick it up in the kitchen. This way, the staff will be able to read them at their leisure if they’re ever unsure of what to do.

A checklist is another good way to get the rules across to your staff. Something like this FSMA compliance checklist would work particularly well.

Teach Your Staff Why the Rules Matter

If you’re introducing new food safety rules in a safe restaurant, your staff may not understand why these rules are important. If they don’t know why they’re important, they might not see the point in following them.

It’s up to you to explain why what you were doing before wasn’t enough, and why you’re introducing these new rules.

Give Your Staff Training

If you want to create a good culture in your restaurant, training your staff is a good start. This is particularly important when you’re introducing new guidelines.

Consider shutting the restaurant for a day to teach your staff about how the new guidelines work and what they need to do. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, you could bring in some food safety experts to help you.

Inspect Your Food When It Arrives

If you receive food that has gone bad, then your staff can only do so much to prevent foodborne illness. You should check the food yourself when it arrives to make sure that it hasn’t spoiled.

Creating a Food Safety Culture Takes Time

Creating a food safety culture at your restaurant is a marathon and not a sprint. Take your time and make changes bit by bit that will add up to make your restaurant safer.

For more helpful guides like this, check out the rest of our blog!