Certified Food Manager MN Archives

March 27, 2023March 16, 2023

Hints For Food Managers Considering A Special Bar Menu

In our food manager certification courses, experienced restaurant pros often exchange ideas and discuss strategies. During a recent session, some students debated creating a bar or lounge menu for casual diners with low food costs. We decided to contribute our insights, which food managers might find useful for special menus in bar, lounge, or patio dining areas.

The Ideal Bar Menu for Food Mangers Considering Something Different

Visiting local restaurants, we often notice a mismatch between the bar menu and dining floor dishes. Crafting a bar menu for regular patrons with your establishment’s theme offers many benefits for food managers.

Ingredients should already be in your inventory
Eases the stress on the kitchen staff
Offers an alternative dining option for guests on busy nights

Food managers designing your bar menu with ingredients from your regular menu can cut food costs. This approach leads to less waste and a lower risk of food spoilage. However, don’t merely serve smaller portions of your dinner menu. For instance, a steak house can offer steak sliders made from steak trimmings or other casual dishes, using available ingredients. Be creative while maintaining the same ambiance for returning guests who dined in the main area previously.

This streamlined concept also aids production during service. Line cooks get frustrated when one or two menu items differ significantly from the rest. This issue slows down service and consumes valuable line storage space. Simplifying and maintaining familiarity helps the kitchen staff serve food to guests promptly.

Offer Options To Retain Customers

Finally, a well-designed bar menu attracts guests unwilling to wait for a full-tabled restaurant. Informing guests of unique lounge or patio options can save them from long waits or trying competitor venues.

What strategies do you use for bar menu planning? Is it necessary to offer special lounge selections, or are regular offerings enough?

March 13, 2023March 27, 2023

A Confidential Certified Food Manager Perspective On Product Recalls

Shows several products a Certified Food Manager may encounter with Product Recalls

If you’ve gained your food manager certification, you know that there are many ways that food-borne illness can spread. Even if you’re diligent with your safety procedures, there may be times when tainted product is delivered to your establishment and can cause a safety issue that you are unaware of. This week, we’ll discuss how a certified food manager can keep up to date on product recalls. Equally important, we will advise on handling potentially compromised product.

Confidential Certified Food Manager Perspective On Product Recalls

How Certified Food Managers Keep Informed About Recalled Food Products

One of the easiest ways to stay informed is to talk with your suppliers. Nowadays, most managers order their supplies online and may only see your supplier’s representatives on rare occasions. Taking the time to have to a regular conversation with your supplier is important for several reasons. And it’s especially helpful to keep you updated on recalls and safety issues with product that you regularly use.

With information readily available on the internet, online sources can be a great resource when researching product recalls. There are, however, numerous sources that may be unreliable. So we’d like to share a few on-line sites that can help keep you up to date:

First, the Minnesota Department of Health is a great resource a certified food manager can use for local product recalls and food safety alerts. This page offers links to local information and external sources for recall alerts. Second, the FDA’s recall site provides an easy to use chart. It defines:

The company involved with the recall
The recall reason
Detailed information concerning the FDA’s action concerning the issue

Finally, Food Safety News is not a government or officially moderated site. But they provide a wealth of information concerning food safety hazards and recalls. Consequently, they cover news that may not be reported by mainstream news outlets.

Handling Potentially Compromised Product

When a certified food manager suspects they have received tainted or recalled product, the first they should notify your supplier. If you received it from a food service supplier, then their representatives will be able to retrieve the product and make sure that you’re reimbursed or a safe product is substituted. If you picked up your potentially contaminated food product directly from the source, it’s generally a good idea to return it to the outlet where you purchased it. In either case, if there are any complications or you’re concerned that this may be a serious issue, you may wish to contact your local health department.

We’d like to know how you keep up to date on food safety issues. Is there a resource or web-site that we may have missed?

February 27, 2023February 2, 2023

Important New Research On Why Food Managers Need Efficient Gas Burners

In early January, several news organizations published articles about the hazards of household gas-burning stoves. Numerous studies indicate that gas stoves in our homes may be emitting several harmful pollutants that could affect the health of our families. Both state and federal agencies are now considering action to limit or ban gas stoves in new building projects. This news generated some lively discussion about gas burners during a break at one of our food protection manager certification classes.

The current news attention has focused on household stoves. But, should we be concerned about standing next to the huge gas-burning stoves in our commercial kitchens? The obvious answer is yes. Certified food protection managers should be concerned about all kitchen employee safety issues and should monitor gas burner studies to gather more information.

But a couple of information points should be highlighted before we start worrying about completely changing our kitchen operations:

The study results have not even mentioned commercial kitchens
Ventilation in our kitchens is much different than what is found in a household kitchen
As professionals we have the knowledge to properly clean and maintain our stoves to make them more efficient and reduce harmful pollutants

This week we’d like to share how a food protection manager can solve the problem of inefficient gas burners.

A Food Protection Managers Guide To Keeping Your Gas Burners Clean and Efficient

If you’re noticing that the burners that you use most frequently aren’t as efficient as they once were, the problem may be easily resolved with a thorough cleaning. Three sure signs food protection managers can use to determine if gas burners may be in need of a little care include:

Uneven heat distribution
Flames at one or two burners aren’t as hot as they once were
Yellow flames mixed with blue

All three of these signs indicate that your gas distribution is being interrupted somewhere in the cap and head of your gas burner assembly. Your gas burner head is the round portion where the gas meets the flame from the pilot light and ignites. If you take a close look at this assembly, you will notice small, pin-point holes circling the head. These holes are where the flame comes from. If they become clogged, the gas cannot escape as quickly. This altered flow causes a lose of heat and release of additional pollutants from your gas burner. This will cause weak yellow flames as spilled debris chars into carbon.

How To Clean Gas Burners

These assemblies are generally easy to remove and clean. Check for clogged burner holes. Often a simple toothpick can break free the debris that was interrupting the gas flow and producing a weak, yellow flame. Keeping burners in top shape may take a little more than clearing clogs occasionally. Food protection managers should schedule regular gas burner cleaning. The process should remove and thoroughly clean the entire burner head. This will remove grease, spilled food product, and dirt from your burner.

If you’re experiencing poor performance in your entire range, the issue may take more than a simple cleaning to resolve. We strongly recommend that you consult a professional rather than attempt to fix the problem yourself.

At Safe Food Training, we endeavor to help our customers with much more than food manager certification in MN. We’d like to know if you have any kitchen equipment topics that you’d like to see us cover in the future. We appreciate all of your comments, and would love to see them below.

January 16, 2023January 27, 2023

Certified Food Managers Dealing With Surging Conflict In The Industry

How a MN Certified Food Manager Deals with Conflict

While you always strive for harmony in the workplace, every once in a while MN certified food managers will have to deal with employee conflict. This week we’d like to take a look at how to prevent dissension in the work place, and deal with issues as they arise.

How a MN Certified Food Manager Deals with Conflict

It’s impossible to completely eliminate employee conflict, especially in stressful environments such as the food industry, but with the right approach you can build a staff that not only gets along but enjoys working together. Talking with human resource managers and food service supervisors, we’ve come up with a few common themes concerning conflict resolution.

Prevent conflict before it starts
Don’t let conflict fester
Involve your HR representative

Our first tip may be hard to do sometimes, but there are ways certified food managers can prevent many conflicts from occurring. Many conflicts in the workplace stem from an individual not being satisfied with their role. Sometimes if an employee isn’t satisfied with their role, they may turn their frustrations towards their fellow employees. If you can identify individuals who are unhappy with their role, you may be able to give them an opportunity express their frustrations to you before they take it out on their coworkers.

The food industry is a stressful place by nature. Another way certified food managers can keep conflict at a minimum is to keep morale high. This can vary from facility to facility, but there are ways to keep morale high under stressful circumstances. Some ways include social interactions such as company events that don’t involve job duties and making sure that breaks are always taken at regular intervals.

Even with the highest morale, it is inevitable that conflict will arise. These are times when you must decide whether to address the issue or let your employees work things out for themselves. It’s not necessary to intervene in every circumstance, but you must use your best discretion. If there is a conflict that you feel will be detrimental to your operation, you need to address it. Sometimes, letting your staff work things out for themselves will lead to further problems. If there are situations which you feel that you’re unable to handle, it may be necessary to bring in a representative from human resources that has been trained to resolve employee conflict.

We know that there is no cut and dry solution to resolving conflicts among your staff, so we’d like you to leave us a comment as to how you or other certified food managers have dealt with these situations.