Do you own, work in or manage a small or medium sized cafe? There are tens of thousands of cafes all across the country, and unfortunately, not all of them practice safe and appropriate food handling techniques. Ensuring the health and wellbeing of your customers should be a top priority – after all, at the end of the day, it’s their money that keeps your business afloat. So, let’s check out in a bit more detail a few helpful tips for safe food handling practice in a cafe setting.
The importance of safe food handling
Learning about this should be at the top of your list, along with ensuring you’ve got the right cafe supplies. Unsafe food handling practices can lead to salmonella, e-coli and other nasty types of infections which can result in your typical food poisoning symptoms.
And if you think a 1-star Google review is bad, imagine a 1-star Google review due to someone copping a bout of food poisoning at your cafe! Or the fines and forced closures that can come with an outbreak. So, it’s important that all layers of the business, from the owner to the manager to the floor and kitchen staff are trained in food handling.
Get trained staff
Untrained and unskilled staff can be guilty of improper food handling. Not because they’re malicious or want to harm your customers but just due to lack of training and inexperience. Consider recruiting staff who have some basic hospitality training where they’ll learn the ins and outs of food handling tips, which we’ll delve into now.
Gloves are essential
Imagine a doctor that didn’t use gloves while examining you! The horror, right?! Well, we believe that the same standards of hygiene should apply in a cafe setting. If your staff are prepping any food they need to wear gloves. Even if they wash their hands ten times prior to making a toasted sandwich, they should still wear gloves. Gloves can stop contamination of food right off the bat leaving your customers sandwiches and eggs safe and sound.
Hair nets
If your kitchen staff have long hair then they need to wear hair nets, no exceptions. While hair may not have the ability to contaminate food as bad as dirty hands do, your customers aren’t going to appreciate finding hairs in their soup or brunch. Hair nets aren’t expensive so stock up so the kitchen always has some on hand.
Don’t mix cutting boards
You need to have separate chopping boards for separate types of ingredients. This is to avoid the risk of cross-contamination. As a rule of thumb, you need one for red meat, one for chicken or poultry, one for fish and one for vegetables. Cutting boards can come colour coded so it’s impossible to mistake one for another. Simply assign each type of food a colour and away you go. To double down on this organisation system ensure that their storage places are labelled with the type of food that should be prepared using that board. Voila!
To wrap it all up
Safe food handling is industry best practice and can protect your customers from food poisoning, and you from liability and fines. To begin with, ensure that any staff you hire have undergone some basic training where they should learn safe food preparation techniques. Staff should always wear gloves and hair nets while preparing any food to avoid contamination. Finally, use different cutting boards for different types of food to avoid cross-contamination. Good luck with the cafe and keep those coffees coming, God knows we all need them, in multiple liters, every day.