Catering Food Hygiene & Your Legal Responsibilities

If you are a senior manager or an employer it’s important that you realise exactly what legal responsibilities you have towards your employee’s… As an employer you have a duty of care. Did you know that legally you can not delegate your duty of care: So if for example any of your employee’s contract food poisoning your responsibilities for their welfare remain; whether you hire a contract caterer or have your own internal catering team

Food hygiene standards are crucial to employee welfare and as a senior manager you have a duty of care.

So other than accepting your catering team’s word; how do you ensure that food in the workplace is safe, clean and fit to eat?

As already outlined food safety standards are of course required by law, but there are additional benefits. There is a distinction between safeguarding the health of employees and subsequent employee performance!

If you ensure employees receive the highest standards they are then likely to perform at the optimum level… Thus improving the quality of their welfare will improve your businesses performance!

Typical issues to look for when considering catering standards; basic checks should include:

* Ensuring catering staff are individually trained to appropriate levels and that on-going refresher training is taking place.
* Checking that when a member of catering staff has an infectious disease i.e. vomiting, coughing, sneezing, diarrhoea or open wound the appropriate action is taken. If infectious they must not be exposed to colleagues in the kitchen or food preparation areas! They should be sent home or given non-food handling activities (as appropriate) ensuring that their illness description including dates is added to the first aid/accident kitchen logbook.
* All food handlers must clearly demonstrate the highest standards of personal hygiene regularly washing and drying their hands when handling food. All clothing and uniforms must be clean, hair must be tied back and covered. No jewellery other than a plain basic wedding band is allowed in food prep areas.
* Appropriate changing room, toilets with hot and cold potable water should be provided.
* Appropriate instructional and warning signage is displayed throughout the kitchen area.
* All hot and cold storage and holding temperatures must be regularly checked.
* All deliveries must be checked.
* No food must be allowed to pass its use by date; if so it must be disposed of. All decanted stored food must be covered, labelled, dated and refrigerated or frozen as necessary.
* In every case, when in doubt food must be thrown out!

All of these actions along with many others MUST be properly recorded; if there are any slip up’s or slackening of standards it is a fact that both you and your caterer are vulnerable. This applies no matter how good you may believe standards currently are.

Anybody with a responsibility for the supervision, instruction and training of catering staff will of course aim to achieve all of these basic requirements; however it is a fact that minor oversights occur and small mistakes are made. As such without a truly independent form of monitoring they leave themselves vulnerable to poor standards and worse; this includes employee days off sick aside from the very real chance of potential litigation through food poisoning claims!

Hygiene standards are vital in preventing food poisoning. In the UK, statistics prove there are 80000 reported cases of food poisoning each year. The belief is that these are only the most serious cases and in reality most people don’t bother reporting incidents, the true figure being 15x times greater! That’s 1.2 million.

Therefore from a due diligence point of view it is very important for every business no matter how large or small to ensure they hold monitoring records collated independently of their catering department.

The most crucial point being it doesn’t matter whether your business uses a contract caterer or employs its own kitchen staff you safeguard your interests.

Source
www.Cssolutionsltd.com