Food safety in Fast-Paced QSR Environments

In this episode we explore the topic that affects millions of meals served every day, managing food safety and hygiene under pressure in the quick service restaurant industry and the solutions Intertek provides to help those businesses protect their brand.

Speakers:

• Catherine Beare - Regional Director Intertek UK and Iberia
• Karen Whiting – Director Retail, Intertek Business Assurance UKI

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Transcript

Catherine Beare

Hello and welcome to the Intertek podcast series where we dive in to a number of different assurance and sustainability matters. In this episode we're going to be exploring food safety in fast-paced environments. I'm Catherine Beare, the Regional Director here at Intertek in the UK and Iberia, and today we're going to be specifically looking in more detail at the topic that affects millions of meals served every day - 
 managing food safety and hygiene under pressure in the quick service restaurant industry.  I'm delighted to be joined by Karen Whiting, who is our Director for retail here in the UK and also supporting our EMEA countries. Karen has been in the food and retail sector for some almost 20 years and has seen lots of different changes in the food safety space over that time.  So Karen, hello and welcome. Thanks for joining me today.

Karen Whiting  

Thank you, Catherine. Great to be here.

Catherine Beare   

Let's start just generally with the landscape. We talk about the QSR, -  quick service restaurant industry and it's ultimately defined by speed, high volume and consistency. But what do you see as the core challenges when it comes to maintaining food safety in such a high pressure environment?

Karen Whiting
Yes, Catherine, absolutely.  I think speed and volume are the double-edged swords here. Team members are often under time pressure. There's high employee turnover and processes can become really routine, which does increase the risk of lapses. What we're talking about here is improper hand washing, poor allergen controls, cross-contamination, foods not held at the right temperature, outdated or unfilled records. Any one of these skipped or missed can lead to that food safety incident, or worse, a customer illness, a one-star hygiene rating or a social media crisis that damages the brand's reputation. Maintaining food safety and hygiene in such a dynamic setting requires discipline, training and that constant reinforcement.

Catherine Beare 
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it's ultimately centering around the staff, correct?

Karen Whiting 
Yes, that's right.

Catherine Beare
Let's talk about the people, because in many QSRs, sometimes you're working with young people, part-time and very new to the role, first time role in many instances.  I can certainly remember doing my time in the restaurant and cafe space in my teenage days. So how does high staff over turnover ultimately impact food safety on the ground?

Karen Whiting 
It's one of the biggest risks in the industry where your staff are constantly changing. You're losing that consistency. You're relying on people who may have only had a few hours of training to handle food safely. During that peak pressure I mentioned earlier, it means the processes have to be really simple, really visual and repeated consistently. You can't just rely on one big onboarding session for your new recruits. You have to have a different approach.

 Catherine Beare  think that that's really imperative. So it's not just training once and then, you know, you've entered the job, here's what you need to do and off you go do it. It's, you know, you can't forget about it, correct?

Karen Whiting  No, you can't, Catherine. No, that's exactly right. we try to look at it as training in layers or bite sized learning. We want to start with short focused training modules, how to wash your hands properly or what to do if a surface is contaminated. Then we reinforce those messages on every shift. We use visual reminders. We have buddy systems. We even have daily meetings to keep that hygiene on the top of everyone's mind. It's making food safety the business culture.

Catherine Beare 

OK, I I love that word. So let's just focus in on that. Can you explain more on culture?

Karen Whiting 
Yeah, culture is key. A strong food safety culture means people do the right thing, even when there's no one watching, even when their boss isn't behind them, even when there isn't a customer at the front of the house, even when they're under that pressure that we have referred to already in this podcast. Culture drives behaviour. If safety is seen as a box to tick, it's the first thing that goes when team members are in a rush are under that pressure. But if it's seen as part of delivering quality, customer trust, brand trust, it should stick. And culture does start at the top. If managers walk past issues, so will team members. But if the manager stops to fix the issue, it really sends a positive culture message. And that message spreads in a high turnover, high pressure environment. Culture is your continuity.

Catherine Beare 
 Yeah, I mean as we know we run thousands of laboratories across the globe and you know our absolute mantra with our own staff in Intertek is that every single person including the senior leadership is responsible for when they walk that floor they
 ensure everything is in order, is clean, is tidy, is prepared, that there are no health and safety risks. And if one person turns a blind eye, that  could set a cultural turn around for everybody doing the same thing. Now it sounds simple, but it's not at all. And that constant repeat that you're talking about there in terms of the embed, embed, create the culture, train and keep that fresh, especially if it's high turnover staff is going to be quite a key area for people to work on. How does Intertek support this journey for our clients?

Karen Whiting 
We work with a number of big name brands to build bespoke audit programs. What we're doing there is we're building them with the clients, not just to be checklists, they're learning tools, driving the continuous improvement and behaviours.
 And in turn, the culture that we've already spoken about. We also use a number of other different audits and work with our clients to support that as well. We do mystery audits, real-time reporting, our digital architecture helps businesses track the way of the performance and motivates the staff, not punishes them. Our success with our clients is that visibility that we have on the individual metrics, that performance and improves the feedback we give our clients time and time again.

Catherine Beare 
Excellent. We could literally talk for hours on this topic and please do everyone listen in to the next steps. But Karen, thank you so much for joining me today. Really, really appreciate those insights and absolutely loved the point on culture, which I guess is the bedrock of what we aim to do every day with customers is help them help their staff create that culture they want by caring and showing them any of the areas where they can continually improve. So in wrapping up - food safety isn't optional. It's your brand's reputation on the line, and we at Intertek SAI Global can support that journey to success with our bespoke food safety and hygiene audit programs that suit your brand. In addition to that, we also have our Intertek Alchemy business which can work with your teams with high end SAAS training solutions to get all your workforce training needs covered, with hundreds of customizable courses that are combined with a powerful platform proven to improve safety, productivity and employee engagement. So let us help you achieve that exceptional guest experience by meeting the highest standards of food safety
 and compliance across your estate. 

So just to finish as a reminder, Intertek SAI Global is the leading global assurance provider supporting clients across all areas of food service and hospitality from Quick Service Restaurants, Casual dining, holiday parks to hotels, pubs, cruise liners and retailer concessions. Our food safety experts across the world help clients protect their brand through extensive and bespoke food safety auditing, training and technical support services. But not just that. We've also much more, including areas like mystery shopping, health and safety, loss prevention to alleviate your ever-evolving challenges in the QSR retail and hospitality sector.

MORE INFORMATION
 www.intertek.com/assurance/hospitality 

Listen in for the next series in our podcast and have a good day. Thank you.