-By James Mellgren

It's not the sexiest job in the store, nor does it lead directly to sales, although ultimately it can affect sales if left unattended. It can be one of the greatest services you offer your customers, even though when done well, they will never even know. If ignored, however, they will not only know about it but may choose to shop elsewhere. I'm talking, of course, about food safety around the store, a practice that admittedly no one thinks is a waste of time, but one for which many retailers rely on common sense, working more or less as they would at home in their own kitchen.

You wash your hands, your knives, your cutting boards, and you don't spend too much time worrying about it otherwise. That is until someone gets sick from eating food they purchased at your store. At that point, not only is the health of one of your customers at stake, so is your store's reputation. Food safety is everyone's business, and as the industry grows larger and becomes more mechanized, the possibility of food-borne illness increases as well. And a good reputation is a terrible thing to waste.

Several Ounces of Prevention
Practicing food safety at home is always a good idea, but it is a very different situation than a foodservice operation at retail. In the deli or commissary kitchen, you are no doubt relying on several other sets of hands to handle the food, its preparation, storage and serving. The more people involved, the greater the risk of contamination, and so no matter how careful you are, taking time to review the steps necessary to prevent a food safety crisis is always a good idea.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 76 million people develop food-borne illnesses each year in the United States, sending 325,000 to the hospital, 5,000 of which result in deaths. In other words, just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it's not happening. When all is said and done, it all boils down to this: food becomes unsafe in one of three ways -- time-temperature abuse, cross-contamination, and/or poor personal hygiene on the part of the food handlers (includes receiving clerks, stockers, cooks, dishwashers, sales counter staff and anyone else who might come in contact with the food). The secret to food safety and the aversion of a crisis, therefore, lies in monitoring and controlling these three areas.

Clean – Separate – Cook – Chill
Several years ago, the Partnership for Food Safety came up with their "Fight Bac!" campaign to help consumers and professionals understand the importance of food safety and give them the information to implement it. The instructional campaign is summed up in four words: clean, separate, cook and chill, the foundations of a healthy kitchen. It is a common-sense approach to food safety and, of course, much of it is mandated by local health regulations, but should nonetheless be reviewed and stressed often. The first may be the most obvious, but all of your best food safety efforts may be for naught if an employee is handling food with dirty hands. You can't stress enough that employees must wash their hands with hot, soapy water not only before and after handling food, but whenever they sneeze, cough, eat, scratch their heads, or use the restroom. Never allow ill employees to handle food.

Clean means more than hand-washing, though. It is equally important to keep work surfaces and utensils clean as well. Routinely sanitize cutting boards and countertops with lemon or bleach. Make a mild bleach solution and keep it in a spray bottle (see sidebar). After cleaning a work surface, simply spray it with the bleach mixture and allow to air dry. The bleach will evaporate immediately, but not before killing unwanted bacteria.

The kind of cross-contamination that often occurs in the home -- putting a cooked chicken back on the platter used to carry it to the grill, adding marinade to the finished dish, using an unclean knife to cut raw vegetables, etc. -- rarely happens in a commercial kitchen, mainly because professional cooks usually know better. I say usually because I've seen young cooks walk through a kitchen dripping juices from raw meat everywhere they go or cutting up raw poultry or fish next to a colander of fresh salad greens. Keeping foods separate and avoiding cross-contamination is key to food safety.

Always cook foods to their proper internal temperature in order to kill harmful bacteria that can cause food-borne illness. Use oven thermometers as well as instant-read meat and poultry thermometers to make sure temperatures are correct. The following are a few tips from the Partnership for Food Safety on proper measures for cooking foods:
Cook roasts and steaks to a minimum of 145° F. All poultry should reach a safe minimum internal temperature of 165° F as measured with a food thermometer. Check the internal temperature in the innermost part of the thigh and wing, and the thickest part of the breast with a food thermometer. Cook ground meat, where bacteria can spread during grinding, to at least 160° F. Information from the CDC links eating undercooked ground beef with a higher risk of illness. Remember, color is not a reliable indicator of doneness. Use a food thermometer to check the internal temperature of your burgers. Cook eggs until the yolk and white are firm, not runny. Don't use recipes in which eggs remain raw or only partially cooked. Cook fish to 145° F or until the flesh is opaque and separates easily with a fork. Make sure there are no cold spots in food (where bacteria can survive) when cooking in a microwave oven. For best results, cover food, stir and rotate for even cooking. If there is no turntable, rotate the dish by hand once or twice during cooking. Bring sauces, soups and gravy to a boil when reheating. Heat other leftovers thoroughly to 165° F.
Chill Out
Cold temperatures retard the growth of harmful bacteria. This sounds simple enough and yet it is one of the easiest of the four guiding principles to neglect. Some tips to making sure foods are chilled properly include:
Keep the refrigerator set at 40° F or below. Don't go too low, though. When you start approaching 32° F, ice crystals can begin to form which can lead to a lowering of quality in the food. Keep the freezer set to 0° F or below. Always use both refrigerator and freezer thermometers. Never let raw meat, poultry or fish sit at room temperature for more than two hours, or more than one hour if the temperature is over 90° F. There are three acceptable ways to defrost food: in the refrigerator, in cold water, or in the microwave. Never defrost food at room temperature. Always marinate food in the refrigerator. Don't overstuff the refrigerator. The air must be able to circulate to effectively maintain cold temperatures evenly.
Who You Gonna Call?
Okay, so your work surfaces and utensils are clean, the refers and freezers are all at the correct temperature, the meat is properly cooked, and there is more hand-washing going on than in a Senate subcommittee. Despite your best efforts, someone gets sick from consuming, or allegedly consuming, food from your store. In order to protect your customers and your store, it's important to have a plan for dealing with a crisis. The best time to plan for a crisis, of course, is in a non-crisis environment. If not, you are likely to make snap decisions that may or may not be in your best interests or the interest of your customers. Crisis management is important even if you are sure the customer did not get sick in your store. The fact is, you just can never be sure, so err on the side of safety.

Take the attitude that a food safety crisis will happen to you sooner or later (if it never does, that's great, but you would be wise to assume it will). Form a crisis management team, made up of employees (store manager, department managers, buyers, cashiers, etc.) who are responsible enough that you can rely on them to make the right decision when you are not around. Assign enough people in differing areas, ensuring that one of them will always be on duty (you can't schedule a crisis). Training should include the ability to assess the situation calmly, make contact with the owner or manager, isolate the food that may have caused the crisis, and handle the media. If it is a crisis that may impact the community, spread the word in a proactive manner to avoid further illness.

If we've learned nothing else from politicians over the years, it is that full disclosure at the time of the incident is the best policy. Be honest, and try to avoid placing blame. People will be more forthcoming if they are not threatened with retribution. Also, remember that if you don't address the media, they will end up talking with someone who is not qualified, and the situation could move from bad to worse. Immediately upon hearing about a food safety incident, rather than assigning blame, conduct an investigation and isolate the offending food if it is still around. Issue progress reports as you discover new information. Above all, be proactive, especially if this is an incident that is known by the community at large. After the crisis subsides, assess what happened and why, give a full account and what you have learned from it. Determine what steps need to be taken to avoid such an incident in the future, even if you believe your systems to be sound. Obviously there was a flaw in your procedures or you wouldn't have had the crisis. Follow up with the entire staff after the crisis. Review what happened, how it was handled, and what, if anything, could have been done differently.

The Paper Chase
When a food safety crisis occurs -- and assume that it will -- a paper trail documenting every dish made on premises will be your best friend. The trail should begin at your receiving door. Establish a record-keeping policy that tracks the ingredients and preparations that go into everything made by your staff. You should be able to read the history of a dish backwards from the moment it leaves the store to the raw ingredients used, and who made it and when. Sound like too much work? It won't when Mrs. Johnson's lawyers call from the emergency room.

Foodservice staff -- cooks and servers -- should always keep a log in which they detail every step of the process in the kitchen and storage areas. The log for a particular dish should include the name of the dish, the date it was prepared, who made it, and the ingredients used. Individual house-made ingredients such as mayonnaise, pesto, BBQ sauces and so on should have their own detailed documentation as well. A log should be kept in the storage areas -- both dry storage and refrigeration -- detailing the flow of goods in and out. Have a place in the logs for notes on unusual circumstances. For example, you may determine that the day Mrs. Johnson got sick the walk-in was cleaned and some of the food sat out for half an hour. Could this have been the cause? The more you know -- even if the findings highlight your mistakes -- the better off your reputation will be after the investigation if you are forthcoming.

Food safety is everyone's business because a serious enough crisis affects everyone's job security. Make sure to hold regular food safety sessions in the store, especially for new employees. Stress the main points of clean-separate-cook-chill, and explain why each is important. It's not enough to tell employees to wash their hands, you must tell them why. Also, encourage everyone to report any potentially dangerous situations, such as leaky boxes or foods that appear damaged or otherwise past their prime. Again, this is not about pointing fingers but identifying trouble before it becomes a crisis. If everyone works together, everyone will benefit -- the customers, the employees, your business and the reputation you've worked so hard to establish.

In the next installment of our two-part food safety series, we'll look at one of the worst offenders of food safety, the consumer. Although you can't completely control what happens to the food once it leaves the store, there are some firewalls that can help avoid incidents in the home that can come back to haunt you in the store. Until then, be safe and wash your hands.

The following cleaning solutions are from the Wisconsin Cheesecyclopedia: Cheese at Retail, a comprehensive workbook published by the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.

Cleaning Solution
1 cup vinegar
2 tablespoons salt
1 gallon warm water

Sanitizing Solution
This is great to keep in a spray bottle. Simply spray it on the work surface and allow to air dry.
1 tablespoon (1/2 ounce) chlorine bleach
1 gallon warm water (between 75 and 120° F.)

Here are some useful Web sites to visit for more information.
www.fightbac.org
www.foodsafety.gov
www.cdc.gov (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

Comments? mellgren56@gmail.com