All Posts Tagged: Food Hygiene Audit

Food Safety during the Olympics

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Richard Mallett

With the Olympics just around the corner the Food Standards Agency have launched a campaign and some useful sources of information about their role and the role of caterers to ensure food safety.

The link can be found here.

We think that this is an opportunity to promote the value of the independent food hygiene audit to any individual or company who will be preparing and serving food, in any capacity.

Benefits of the food hygiene (food safety) audit

  1. Expert assessment of your controls and premises against the European Food Hygiene Regulations and the Food Hygiene Regulations 2006 – these are the same pieces of legislation that the local environmental health officers will themselves be using to conduct official inspections.
  2. Clear and unambiguous colour coded hygiene audit reports that are easily understood.
  3. Full and simple debrief of on site staff by our expert auditors.
  4. Easier and better official inspections (by the environmental health officers) – you will already be compliant and protecting your due diligence!
  5. Reduced risk of legal contravention of civil litigation – common outcomes from food poisoning or food borne disease which result from poor food hygiene standards.

Can you afford not to if you are going to be an Olympics caterer? Call us or reply using the Contact Us page of our website to find out more about this affordable and essential service.

Food Hygiene Rating Scheme – a milestone reached

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Richard Mallett

The Food Standards Agency has reported a flurry of activity by the local authorities across England which has resulted in the milestone of more than 250 local authorities joining this food hygiene rating scheme. It is expected that coverage will be 97% across England, Wales and Northern Ireland before the end of 2012.

What is the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme?

It is a scheme run by the local authorities in conjunction with the Food Standards Agency. Each food business is given a rating from 5 to 0, where 5 represents excellent food hygiene standards and 0 indicates that urgent improvements are required.

Who is it useful for?

It is intended to provide a guide to consumers as to the food hygiene status of the food establishment. It is also of paramount importance to the food industry, particularly the hotel, catering, food-service and conferencing sector (where catering is provided). It helps senior management of these establishments to understand whether they have adopted good food hygiene management practices and, we feel, is a crucial extra selling point. Imagine for instance a major hotel chain courting the conferencing business of a large blue chip multinational business. Such businesses need to mitigate risk and they will look at this aspect of risk.

How can I get a good rating?

You can get a good rating partly with plain old common sense and partly by implementing the good HACCP based codes of practice such as Codex Alimentarius, the Food Safety Agency Safer Food Better Business Guide and the myriad of advice available from the Food Standards Agency and others. In brief: Manage your housekeeping, waste control, food room layout and maintenance, food storage controls – such as secure storage, stock rotation and temperature, cooking and cooling temperature controls, cleaning and staff training….and you are half way there!

External Hygiene Audits

We also fundamentally believe that regular external hygiene audits can provide an extremely useful summary of controls that are working well and areas for improvement, by priority, both to mitigate your risk to your customers…and yes to help you on the way to achieving and maintaining that crucial score of 5 in the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme. Call us to find out more and to see if a programme of hygiene audits can help your catering or food service facilities.

The gloves are off!

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Richard Mallett

What an interesting article in the European Cleaning Journal that reports on a study about poor hand hygiene within healthcare workers who wear gloves!

This hazard is something also recognised within the food industry of course. We have seen with our own eyes the lack of hand washing and significant potential for cross contamination caused by catering workers wearing gloves and then failing to exercise proper control. The simple rules are:-

  1. Consider the glove really just as a “second skin” – you will pick up the same bacteria from raw foods and dirty surfaces. You do not become invincible or invisible to microbes!
  2. Change gloves frequently – especially after touching dirty areas or raw food.
  3. Change damaged gloves.
  4. Wash the hands when changing gloves – the build up of perspiration and warmth perpetuates the increase in bacterial population on the hands.
  5. Make sure the gloves are made of food safe material – look for instance for the little glass and fork symbol on the packaging which will tell you this. Look for some sort of accreditation to food safety such as the globally trusted HACCP International certification.
  6. Blue gloves are better! If they do fragment then the control of last resort is that the catering worker should be able to identify fragments of broken glove contaminating food

Proper glove control as well as hand hygiene is just one of the things that are assessed during MQM Consulting Food Hygiene Audits.

Co-operative Consortium announced

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Richard Mallett

MQM Consulting is absolutely delighted to announce that it has joined a Consortium of like minded professional organisation providing services to the food and related industries. The Consortium was set up by Peter and Nathan Reilly – the father and son founders of Cleaner Products – a company dedicated to the provision of UK produced cleaning chemicals and full technical support to the food industry.

We have joined as the technical experts for Food safety, Food Hygiene Audits, HACCP and BRC Certification. The Consortium contains dedicated professional companies within the pest control, cleaning chemicals, IT and customer services industries. This will soon grow to include other organisations able to offer other services to the food industry.

We remain as independent companies within the Consortium. This enables us all to draw on our strengths, collectively, and to provide a unique customer orientated service provision, without any conflict of interest. We support each other and have an innate trust in each other’s abilities which means that when we recommend each other to the food industry, we do so comfortably, knowing that the customer will receive a first rate service.

Public remain concerned about hygiene standards in restaurants

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Richard Mallett

The European Cleaning Journal contains an interesting article about consumer attitudes to staff hygiene in restaurants.

It generally showed that there is still, overall, a low level of consumer confidence about food hygiene in restaurants and fast food outlets. Tork washroom products manufacturer SCA commissioned a survey of 4000 Europeans and found that 59% considered that restaurant and fast food premises should look clean and tidy before they go in. An astonishing 85% of Polish have opened the door and left again straight away because the premises did not look clean.

The majority of the participants directly linked dirty toilets to a high likelihood of the kitchen being dirty too. On a positive note about 81% do believe that the chefs and food handlers wash their hands before cooking and after using the toilet (although fairly recent UK Food Standards Agency survey data sadly indicates that in practice quite the opposite is true in the UK). They are not confident however about what chefs might do with food that has fallen on the floor!

If this is the state of current consumer confidence then doesn’t this justly link food hygiene standards to commercial advantage? If a restaurant is prepared to implement, adopt and then boast of its food hygiene standards, perhaps using audit, hygiene certification and of course social media networking sites, then they may just be hitting one of the customers biggest hot buttons.

 

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