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A New Look At Food Safety Certification Hand-Washing Stations

handwashing-food worker washing hands

As a certified food safety manager, you know that proper handwashing is the cornerstone of preventing foodborne illness. While the 20-second scrub is a critical skill taught in every certification course, your responsibility extends far beyond just the technique. The physical environment where handwashing occurs—the handwashing station itself—is a critical control point that demands constant oversight. A poorly maintained station can undermine even the best-trained staff, creating a weak link in your food safety defenses.

This guide will move beyond the basics to focus on three essential areas of management: perfecting the setup of every handwashing station. It will also reinforce the critical moments for hand hygiene and extend your high standards to guest-facing areas.

Perfecting the Setup: Anatomy of an Effective Handwashing Station

An effective handwashing policy is only as good as the tools you provide. Consider every designated hand sink, from the kitchen line to the employee restroom, as a vital piece of safety equipment. Your role is to ensure each one is always ready for service.

The Non-Negotiables: Soap, Towels, and Hot Water

Handwashing
Handwashing is vital for all kitchen staff.

A handwashing station is incomplete without its essential components. Staff should never have to search for soap or paper towels, as this creates a barrier to compliance. Always fill and make dispensers easily accessible. Furthermore, hot water is a requirement. Make it a part of your opening procedures to run the taps at each sink to ensure hot water is readily available, especially during colder months when pipes take longer to warm up.

Reinforcing Behavior with Visual Cues

Even the most experienced staff benefit from reminders. Placing a clear, simple handwashing instructional poster within view of every sink serves as a constant reinforcement of proper procedure. This simple tool helps maintain a consistent standard across your entire team, demonstrating a visible commitment to food safety.

Reinforcing the When: Critical Moments for Hand Hygiene

A certified food safety manager must instill in their team not just how to wash their hands, but also when. This requires diligent training and consistent oversight to build reflexive habits in your staff.

From Routine to High-Risk

Handwashing is required at routine intervals, such as before beginning a shift and after eating, smoking, or using the restroom. However, we must be cautious of high-risk tasks. The most critical of these is after handling raw animal proteins. This action must be automatic and immediate to prevent cross-contamination.

The Glove and Handwashing Connection

It’s a common misconception that wearing gloves replaces the need for handwashing. Gloves can be contaminated just like hands. Train staff to wash their hands before putting on new gloves and after taking them off. A change of task, especially from a raw to a ready-to-eat product, requires a glove change and handwashing.

Extending Standards: The Overlooked Guest Restroom

Your commitment to hygiene should not end where the kitchen does. Customer restrooms are a direct reflection of your establishment’s overall standards of cleanliness and safety.

A Reflection of Your Brand

A clean, well-stocked guest restroom conveys to your customers that you value their well-being. This area must have the same essential components as your staff stations: an ample supply of soap, paper towels, and readily available hot water. Failing to address this area can damage your reputation.

Promoting Public Health

While you cannot enforce health guidelines on customers, you can encourage them to follow them. Placing a handwashing poster in the guest restroom can gently promote proper hygiene and help reduce the spread of illness within your community, reinforcing your role as a responsible public establishment.

Ultimately, the diligence you apply to these seemingly small details separates an adequate food safety program from an exceptional one. As a certified food safety manager, your leadership in maintaining every handwashing station and reinforcing proper protocols is crucial to keeping your food, staff, and customers safe.

You can explore our comprehensive certification and renewal courses to ensure your entire team learns these critical food safety basics. 

Register for an upcoming course with Safe Food Training today!

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Timely ServSafe Food Manager Guide To Preventing A Halloween Nightmare

Jill Anderson

Vampires, goblins, zombies, the ghost under the bed, and peanuts: Halloween is coming, and these terrifying evils will be everywhere. We all love a good scare this time of year, but no costumed ghoul frightens parents more than hidden allergens in Halloween treats. Let’s do a ServSafe food manager review for lurking Halloween allergens.

ServSafe Food Manager Guide to Preventing a Halloween Nightmare
Image credit: Jill Anderson via Flickr

ServSafe Food Manager Tips For Allergy-Safe Halloween Activities

Parents are picky when it comes to where their kids trick or treat—especially those parents with children with severe food allergies. Halloween is one of the biggest holidays for ServSafe food managers to attract children and families to their facilities. Halloween parties are frequently held in school cafeterias or banquet halls. Our challenge is ensuring we don’t inadvertently serve items that could cause a reaction. Here are a few ideas:

  • Identify potential allergens used in your facility
  • Provide an ingredient list for all treats
  • Serve only pre-packaged food from reliable sources

It helps to ease parent’s minds when they know what their kids are putting in their bodies. If you have food allergies, have kids with food allergies, or know someone who does, then you probably have felt that sense of panic when someone you know could have a severe allergic reaction. The feeling is incredibly intense when ingesting something with unknown ingredients is possible. Knowledge and full disclosure help ensure little goblins choose allergen-free Halloween snacks.

The first step for a ServSafe food manager considering a Halloween event should be to post if your facility processes or uses common allergens such as peanuts, shellfish, wheat, and dairy. Following this up with posted ingredients for each item served will allow parents to make good choices in finding allergen-free Halloween treats. You don’t necessarily have to give away all your recipes and baking secrets. Simply informing party attendees of the ingredients used prevents accidental ingestion of allergens during a ServSafe food manager Halloween event.

The Safest Option

Finally, serving prepackaged Halloween treats from reliable sources with clearly labeled ingredients can be the safest way to host a Halloween event and minimize the risk of guests coming into contact with allergens. We know that many restaurants and other outlets use Halloween to expose as many people as possible to their product or menu items, but sometimes playing it safe and providing prewrapped candy and allergen-safe Halloween treats will show parents that you’re looking out for their children’s health. They may return to sample your cuisine another time.

Do you host Halloween events, and if so, what steps do you, as a ServSafe food manager, take to serve items free from allergens?

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Certified Food Manager Advice: How To Prevent Hazardous Slip Injuries

MN Certified Food Manager Preventing Injuries

Not only is it essential to keep the food you supply to your customers safe, but it’s also vital to ensure that your staff has a safe environment to work in. Slip-and-fall injuries are one of the most common reasons food service workers miss time, so we’d like to discuss how a certified food manager can prevent these painful slip injuries.

MN Certified Food Manager Preventing Injuries

The Certified Food Manager’s Role in Preventing Slip Injuries

The manager must make it abundantly clear to the staff that their safety is a priority. Staff and certified food managers must work together to effectively prevent injuries from slips and falls. Providing the necessary tools and comprehensive training is a non-negotiable priority to ensure everyone can perform their duties safely.

One common factor in many slip-and-fall injuries is the use of the wrong kind of shoes. Food service workers should wear non-slip shoes specifically designed for the food industry. Many non-slip shoes are available, but we recommend that your staff wear shoes explicitly designed to give the wearer good traction on wet and greasy surfaces.

Just wearing good, non-slip shoes does not entirely prevent a slip accident. A kitchen supervisor must create an environment where these events are rare. A good start is to provide a perforated rubber surface for employees to stand on. These floor mats are readily available through most food service industry providers. We feel that these mats must be perforated in some way to allow grease to slip through to the floor beneath in the event of a spill. This will prevent liquids from pooling on the floor mats, creating a slipping hazard.

Clean Mats For Safety

Another critical step certified food managers must take to reduce slip injuries is to clean the mats and floors beneath daily. Grease and liquids can accumulate on your floor mats, making them nearly as slippery as the hard flooring underneath. Clean the kitchen floors daily with a degreasing agent to prevent mats from slipping. Before replacing the mats after cleaning the floor, we strongly recommend that the floors dry. Water and soap can take longer to dry if covered by your floor mats, increasing the likelihood that they will slide during everyday use.

Finally, clean every spill immediately. Don’t trust your floor mats to prevent a slip after spilling liquid. Being complacent could lead to a painful injury and lost work for one of your valued employees.

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Latest ServSafe Guidelines For Disastrous Listeria

Serve Safe Certification Guide to Listeria

When we prepare for ServSafe certification classes, we monitor food product recalls and FDA warnings concerning food-borne illness outbreaks. In the last three months, nine people have died, and nearly 60 patients have been hospitalized with Listeria. The source of this outbreak was tracked to meats sliced at delis, including Boar’s Head brand liverwurst, which was contaminated with Listeria and sickened people. With Listeria impacting food safety and being prevalent in the news, ServSafe managers must understand this bacterium, how it spreads, and how to prevent it from sickening customers who consume your food products.

ServSafe Certification Guide to Listeria
Image Credit: by jpalinsad360 thru www.flickr.com

ServSafe Certification Guide to Listeria

Listeria is a unique case for food-borne illness suspects because, unlike many other bacteria, it grows and multiplies at much colder temperatures than other contaminants. This means that any product contaminated with Listeria can be dangerous, even if stored in the refrigerator. Listeria bacteria can remain active at temperatures that approach and dip below freezing.

The low breeding temperature of Listeria makes it vital that ServSafe managers handle food properly. Ensure you rinse raw produce thoroughly, cook all prepared foods to the proper temperatures, and always clean and sanitize prep surfaces after preparing raw foods. Some of the most common foods that are responsible for Listeria outbreaks include:

  • Raw dairy and soft cheeses
  • Raw sprouts
  • Hot dogs and deli meats
  • Smoked or cold-cured seafood

Even though these are the most common sources of Listeria, we have noticed an increase in recalls and outbreaks traced back to frozen vegetables and fruits. We urge you to monitor FDA recalls. You can easily do this by viewing the FDA widget on the right-hand side of our blog page.

While ServSafe managers cringe at discussing the effect of Listeria poisoning, it is vital to understand the symptoms to identify the cause of a foodborne illness. Listeria poisoning incubates between a few days to a few months, so symptoms can arise long after tainted food has been consumed. Symptoms can include:

  • Fever
  • Soreness in the neck
  • Disorientation
  • Reduced strength
  • Vomiting

A quick read of Listeria poisoning symptoms closely resembles a list of flu symptoms with a few exceptions. Listeria attacks the nervous system as well as the digestive system. When you hear about these symptoms, there is a chance that Listeria is the culprit.

What to Do If You Have A Listeria Outbreak


If you do have an unfortunate incident involving Listeria at your establishment, it is essential to cooperate with your local health department. The bacteria could have originated from one of your suppliers, so giving the health department all your information can help prevent further cases.

If you want to learn more about Listeria and other bacteria, we offer ServSafe certification classes online or led by a qualified instructor.