Taking Food Safety Seriously in the Food Industry

Most people who go out for a meal implicitly trust that their food is safely and professionally prepared, free from unwelcome, unexpected ingredients such as toenails or – in keeping with the old joke – flies. Our intention with this blog is not to put you off your next fine-dining or take-out experience but rather to highlight the necessity in the food industry of taking Food Safety seriously.

A Not-So-Happy Meal

According to Fortune, 48 million Americans are made ill by contaminated food each year! If you have a strong stomach, you can visit sites like iwaspoisoned.com to read, usually in graphic detail, how people have been affected by badly prepared food. It’s a horror story. Other sites describe some of the disconcerting things that people have found in their food, that ought not to have been there: from a mouse baked into a loaf of bread, a whole chicken’s head discovered in a box of McDonald’s chicken wings, to a razor in a frozen dessert bought at Walmart.

Some have attempted to falsely incriminate restaurants for potentially massive pay-outs. One such case involved a woman who claimed to have found a severed finger in her bowl of Wendy’s chilly. After the FBI launched an investigation to find the owner of the finger, it turned out to belong to an acquaintance of the accuser’s husband, who had lost his finger in an industrial accident.

And sometimes, the unwelcome things lurking in our food are not-so-obvious. South Africa has recently seen the worst recorded case of listeriosis; according to the World Health Organization, the food-borne bacteria has claimed nearly 200 lives in the last 18 months. The outbreak was traced back to Tiger Brands’ Enterprise Food factory producing processed meats, and reportedly occurred due to poor food safety. The organization has lost approximately $2.8 million as a result of the mass recall of all affected food. This is just one instance where poor health safety has led to costly consequences. Fortune cites a 2015 study which estimated that the annual cost to the US food industry (including medical treatment, lost productivity, and illness-related mortality) is $55.5 billion; and then there is the impact of reputational damage.

Improving Food Safety Measures

Coggno has selected some excellent courses to address food safety gaps in an attempt to keep the proverbial flies out of customers’ soup and to avoid preventable financial and reputational damage to organizations in the food industry:

Food Service Sanitation Course
Food Service Inspections Course
Preventing Cross Contamination in the Kitchen
Safe Temperatures for Food Storage, Preparation, and Service Course
Food Service Storage Course

*Discounts applicable: 20% OFF, valid thru May 5th, 2018!

“Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?”
“Oh my, that’s the wrong fly! Let me take your soup back to the kitchen and make sure you get the right fly.