CFPMs Take Advantage Of The New Meal Kit Market

CFPMs Take Advantage Of The New Meal Kit Market

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Restaurant patrons have taken to cooking at home more over the past few years, and this gives food businesses and restaurants the opportunity to take advantage of this new market. If you’re looking for a way to reach new customers and give them a chance to cook their favorite menu items at home, you may want to consider offering meal kits with everything they need to prepare their favorite dish. Since you’re not cooking these meals in-house, there’s a different set of challenges involved. Let’s consider what Certified Food Managers ( CFPMs ) should consider when preparing meal kits for customers to cook at home.

CFPMs Take Advantage Of The New Meal Kit Market
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CFPMs Food Safety Challenges for Take Home Meal Kits

Meal kits can help boost your business, but certified food protection managers must make your staff aware of the unique food safety hazards is the key to doing it safely. Your kit can include raw protein ingredients, fresh vegetables, cooked products and dried spices, so there are several different food handling rules you have to consider.

The biggest concern will be cross-contamination during preparation and packaging. Make sure all fresh ingredients are stored away from raw products at all times. If you sell these kits at high volume, have your certified food protection manager designate space in your walk-in refrigeration so there can be no risk of cross-contamination during storage.

The highest risk of cross-contamination may occur during packaging. Many of these meal kits fit into one large box, so keeping raw food separated from fresh ingredients can create some difficulties. If you do use one large box for these kits, we suggest tightly sealed and separate containers for raw ingredients. We’d also recommend taking it a step further and placing these sealed containers in a separate box within the larger crate for dual-layer protection. It’s also important to consider some sort of cold pack or ice bag to keep cold foods cold during transport.

Since you’re not cooking these items in your establishment, temperature control is left up to the consumer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to give them the information they need to cook every ingredient properly. Include incredibly detailed recipe cards that list proper cooking temperatures. You can experiment with cooking times of meal kit ingredients in your restaurant and include that information, but CFPMs should remember not every oven will cook at precisely the same rate. Include warnings that will indicate the properly cooked temperature for each ingredient. You may even wish to go so far as to offer probe thermometers at an additional cost.

Are you using meal kits as a way to reach new customers?

How to Create a Food Safety Culture

How To Create A Culture Of Food Safety

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Certified ServSafe food managers have the duty to ensure that the food they serve is safe and that their operation adheres to the Minnesota food code, but can they do more to make food safety a habit rather than simple compliance? Creating a culture in your establishment that promotes food safety rather than code compliance greatly reduces the risk of spreading foodborne illness.

How to Create a Food Safety Culture
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Five Tips for Creating a Food Safety Culture

Keeping your entire staff focused on food safety improves awareness concerning foodborne illness risks and keeps food safety on everyone’s mind. Here are five ways ServeSafe food managers can build a food safety culture in their businesses:

  • Management Modeling
  • Explain the Science
  • Ease Access to Food Safety Tools
  • Keep Logs
  • Bring in and Expert for Training

A food safety culture starts at the top, and ServSafe food managers need to lead by example. If you model a pro-food safety attitude, your staff is sure to follow. If your staff sees that food safety is serious, and they know why, then they’ll be more diligent in keeping food safe. Beyond modeling food safety, explaining the science behind food safety regulations helps show the consequences of lax attention to food code rules. Make sure you not only demonstrate how, but explain why your food safety procedures have been implemented.

If you are trying to promote food safety values, it’s also important that your staff has easy access to the tools and record keeping logs that aid in keeping food safe. Make sure every station is stocked with the equipment to prevent bare-hand contact, test temperature of hot and cold product and sanitation. If there’s no readily available equipment to follow food safety procedures, the chances for taking shortcuts increase. You should also consider making record keeping logs available. Temperature logs for held food, product dating notebooks and inventory control logs will paint a visual picture of important procedures that keep food illness risk low.

Finally, an outside view of your establishment can open your staffs eyes to food safety risks they may not have been previously aware of. Bringing in a third-party expert for on-site training tailored to your unique facility gives you a focused look at how food safety can work in your food business.

How do you foster a culture of food safety in your establishment?

Founder of Safe Food Training

A Tribute To Doug Nick Founder Of Safe Food Training

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On January 16th of this year our friend and founder of Safe Food Training, Doug Nick passed away unexpectedly. Doug founded the company in 1998 and built it from the ground up. He retired from the business operations in 2011 but stayed active as an instructor for several years after that.

Doug Nick Founder of Safe Food Training

Doug founded Safe Food Training with the intent of providing an informative and productive learning environment that also was fun and interactive. He would often say people do not learn well when they are bored to tears. We adhere to those principals to this day.

Doug was a business partner, friend and mentor for me and I truly appreciate all that he did for myself and the business to assure it would continue to thrive.

There are a few people in your life who really make a huge and positive lasting impact. Doug Nick was one of those people in my life and I am forever grateful.

You are missed.

Tim Niles

How to Food Safety Training for Pathogen Free Marinades

How to Food Safety Training for Pathogen Free Marinades

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Marinades infuse meats, poultry and even vegetables with great flavors, but if you’re not careful they may also infuse your food with pathogens, bacteria and other contaminants that could sicken guests. As the saying goes, so it’s important to make sure that your extra flavor doesn’t come with a dose of illness. Let’s explore food safety training for pathogen-free marinades.

How to Food Safety Training for Pathogen Free Marinades
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Food Safety Training to Prevent Tainted Marinades from Causing Foodborne Illness

There are three major concerns when it comes to food safety training for bacteria-free marinades:

  • Cross-contamination
  • Spoiled Fresh Ingredients
  • Temperature Control

If you’re using the same marinade for multiple purposes, you run the risk of mixing two ingredients that may be required to be cooked to different temperatures. You’ll inevitably contaminate some ingredients if you mix multiple items in the same container. Meats and vegetables cook at different temperatures, and poultry requires a much higher final cooking temperature than most other raw foods. To avoid any type of cross-contamination, use a separate container to marinate different ingredients. It’s also a good food safety procedure to throw out marinades used for raw ingredients and start over each time you marinade new ingredients regardless of type.

If you make your own marinades in-house and make more than you need for any given day, make sure you take note of the shelf life of any fresh ingredients involved. Fresh ingredients spoil over time naturally and adding them to liquids can accelerate the process. Use proper labeling techniques to date all marinades and have a defined expiration date on all marinades and marinated product.

Temperature control can also sometimes be an issue with large batches of marinades. When soaking raw proteins, make sure that all ingredients are out of the danger zone, and don’t soak any protein at room temperature.

Finally, if you utilize dry rubs or marinades, you should still follow the same food safety procedures as wet marinades.

What’s the favorite marinade you use in your restaurant?