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Food safety is crucial for every business in the hospitality industry, but it can be especially tricky for caterers, who often provide food service on location. To help you meet your compliance obligations and keep your customers safe, the experts at Telsen have put together this handy guide detailing the top 6 ways caterers can ensure food safety success.
The first and most important step in any food safety strategy is to provide your team with detailed and current knowledge of your business’s policies and guidelines. Staff training should be ongoing and must cover all aspects of food handling, preparation, transportation, service, and storage. Topics to address regularly include compliance, equipment instructions, cleanliness, waste, personal hygiene, protective equipment, risk management, and reporting.
If you’re struggling to keep on top of your training goals, Telsen can help with staff training schedules and reminders to keep your catering team supported and their knowledge up-to-date.
Once you’ve equipped your team with all the necessary training to meet their food safety requirements, you’ll also want to ensure they have the tools to do what’s needed on event day. A digital food safety management system can help you streamline complex systems and processes to ensure that your team are delivering safely and consistently, no matter what type of event.
Take a systematic approach to food safety with a HACCP plan that identifies potential hazards and establishes controls to eliminate risks. This will enable you to proactively manage biological, chemical, or physical hazards that can occur at any stage of the food production process.
From cleaning checks to temperature recordings, Telsen can support your catering team with customised digital food safety diaries and checklists to cover all aspects of food safety and ensure that every critical area and activity is thoroughly monitored and assessed.
Health and Safety in catering practices are only as good as the records you keep, and being ready for a catering food safety audit is crucial. Traditionally, this meant stacks of paper, filing cabinets, and hours spent manually documenting procedures and compliance measures. But with Telsen's digital solution, all of that changes.
Our system automates record-keeping, tracking everything in the background so your records are instantly available, anytime, anywhere. No more paperwork, no more hassle - just streamlined safety management at your fingertips. Learn how Telsen can help.
In order to meet food safety requirements, caterers must store, transport, and serve food within approved temperature ranges. Chilled food should be stored in refrigerators or freezers with thermometers installed, and calibrated probes should be used to ensure that food is prepared and served at the correct temperature.
The easiest way to monitor and maintain the temperature of your food at every stage of the catering process is with an automated, remote monitoring system like Telsen. Our IoT sensors automate all temperature checks with continuous, real-time monitoring and alerts, ensuring compliance and helping you address issues as they arise. For smaller sites, you can also capture temperature readings manually through our app, giving you all the benefits of a digital solution without the hassle of paper.
Contamination is one of the biggest challenges for health and safety in catering; to keep your business free from contaminants, it’s important to store and label food correctly, and separate ingredients and activities that could lead to cross-contamination.
When preparing, transporting, or storing food, you need to keep raw and cooked foods separate. Clearly label and date any storage containers, and use colour-coded chopping boards to indicate whether they are to be used for raw ingredients or cooked ingredients.
It is important to be aware of and take precautions around potential allergens. Clearly label products or ingredients with common allergens, ensure that they are safely stored and carefully prepared, and train staff in how to handle allergic reactions.
Keep all food handling areas clean and free of waste, and implement pest prevention and control measures to avoid potential contamination. Utilise cleaning schedules and checklists to ensure that staff are keeping an eye on cleanliness and hazards at all times.
Maintaining cleanliness is challenging across the hospitality sector and especially so for catering businesses that often operate on-site at other premises. By ensuring that your staff are well-trained and your systems and processes are robust, you can maintain food safety at any catering location.
Clearly communicate cleaning and waste management expectations to your staff, including instructions for how and when to clean food preparation areas, sinks, floors, and surfaces. Make sure they know proper hygiene practices and are provided with suitable cleaning equipment and sealed waste containers that are easy to disinfect. Do not allow waste to accumulate, and implement regular cleaning measures, with particular attention to areas where raw food is handled.
Telsen can help you streamline these responsibilities by automating your cleaning schedules as workflows with checklists and reminders to keep your staff on track.
Food preparation and service areas involve inherent risks such as fire, spills, heavy lifting, and knives. To prevent injury and keep your staff, customers, and the public safe from harm, it’s important to implement control measures to combat these common risks.
Make sure that your staff know how to assess, document, and manage any incidents or near-misses that occur, and provide specialised training where necessary. A HACCP plan is a critical tool to help you manage risks. Telsen can automate yours, allowing you to track hazards and proactively make changes to keep your team safe.
Food safety can be daunting for catering teams, but it doesn’t have to be. With Telsen’s automated sensors, checklists, and systems, you can quickly see how you’re tracking, where your gaps are, and how to meet your health and safety requirements with ease.
Book a demo with Telsen today to learn more!