For businesses that store, prepare and sell food, staying on top of food safety standards and keeping their space clean and tidy is vital, both to customer safety and business success.
Any company in the UK that handles fresh food needs to be registered with the Food Standards Agency (FSS), a non-ministerial government department that regulates and monitors the sale of food products.
The organisation conducts unscheduled inspections of food businesses to make sure that they are abiding by its regulations and keeping consumers safe.
As such, any business that prepares and handles fresh food, be it a restaurant or delicatessen, bakery or café, needs to be make sure that it is ready for an FFS inspection. Read on to find out more about how you can ensure your business always passes with flying colours and provides customers with safely prepared, delicious delicacies.
Set Safe Practices In Place
FSS inspections are notoriously hard to prepare for because they happen at random, and inspectors often don’t announce themselves at first, but instead pretend to be a customer to observe the way you and your team operate. As such, you need to make sure that you have practices in place that will ensure you’re always ready for when the inspector arrives.
Understand The Regulations
Any business that serves and prepares food needs to know what regulations they need to abide by. From the guidelines around allergies to ensuring traceability of ingredients, food safety to cross contamination, it’s important that you as a business leader understand everything that the FSS inspector will be looking at and are able to implement processes that will ensure your organisation is fully compliant.
Train Your Staff
Team members need to be given regular training if they are going to be responsible for keeping your firm’s food preparations areas safe, so invest in training sessions that will help them to feel confident in their roles and able to carry them out effectively and efficiently. Explore the range of food safety courses on offer to find the one that suits your team and will give them the insight and knowledge that they need.
Keep Your Workplace Clean
Cleanliness is one of the key factors in food regulation, as a dirty food preparation area could harbour dangerous bacteria. Also, a disorganised space could lead to cross contamination or poor date checking, meaning that customers could be exposed to out of date food that contains allergens that they cannot ingest. To reduce the chances of this happening and ensure your firm passes its FSS inspection for cleanliness, work with a specialist cleaning company that can deep clean your workplace regularly and help you and your team to keep it constantly clean. Visit idealcleaning.co.uk to find out more about the specialist commercial cleaning services this expert firm offers.
Review Procedures Regularly
Food standards regulations change frequently, and consumer expectations are constantly rising, meaning that you need to review your firm’s food safety procedures on a regular basis to ensure that they remain effective. Schedule procedure reviews throughout the year and take the time to communicate with both staff and customers to find out what they think can be improved.
