Essential Summer Food Safety Tips for Hospitality Kitchens
Summer brings sunshine, happy customers, and sizzling kitchens! But with those balmy days comes the added responsibility of keeping food safe. With warmer weather creating the perfect conditions for bacteria to thrive, food safety becomes even more critical.
We know you're juggling a million things – menus, staffing, and creating memorable dining experiences. It's a demanding time of year. That's why we've put together some key food safety tips to keep your food safe, meet compliance standards, and keep your kitchen smooth sailing over the summer.
Managing Received Goods
The warmer weather can impact your deliveries. Here's how to ensure your ingredients arrive in tip-top shape:
- Schedule deliveries during cooler hours: Early mornings are ideal, minimising the time your perishables spend exposed to heat.
- Inspect upon arrival: Check deliveries for signs of spoilage, like damaged packaging, use by dates or excessive condensation.
- Temperature is king: Use a reliable thermometer to verify the temperature of chilled and frozen deliveries and record details as required.
- Put goods away promptly: Ensure that chilled and frozen food is stored in fridges/freezers quickly, food is arranged so that food with the soonest use-by or best-before dates are used first and ensure that food is covered and clearly labelled.
- Keep records: track your deliveries including supplier details, type and quantity of food and temperature. If there are any issues, details and actions taken must be documented.
Fridge and Freezer Essentials
Keeping your fridges and freezers humming along is crucial for food safety. Here's how:
- Temperature Checks: Schedule regular temperature checks and keep records. Chomp's automatic temperature loggers can take the stress out of this – they'll monitor temperatures continuously, alerting you immediately if any temperatures fall out of an acceptable range.
- Organisation is key: Don't overcrowd fridges and freezers. This prevents proper air circulation and can raise internal temperatures.
- First In, First Out: Implement a "first-in, first-out" system to ensure older items are used first.
- Maintenance and equipment checks: Chillers and freezers may become inefficient or break down allowing temperatures to rise and bugs to grow in food. Make sure your fridges and freezers have been serviced and checked on a regular schedule and that this is documented.
Hot Kitchens, Cool Heads: Hygiene Practices
Hygiene is always important, but it's especially important during the summer months when warmer temperatures and increased humidity create ideal conditions for bacteria to thrive. Remind the team about maintaining a high level of hygiene amidst the hustle, including:
- Personal hygiene: Frequent handwashing, keeping cuts covered and changing gloves frequently if used. With warmer temps, staff are more likely to sweat so encourage that uniforms are washed/changed more frequently to prevent cross-contamination.
- Sanitise: Surfaces, boards, knives, utensils and equipment.
Chomp: Your Year Round Safety Partner
Keeping on top of food safety tasks can feel overwhelming. Chomp has been designed to help lighten the load, keeping you compliant, your food quality exceptional and most importantly your customers safe.
Our user friendly digital app makes food safety management easy:
- Colour coded tasks so you can see what needs to be done when.
- Automated and tracked staff food handler training.
- Audit ready at any time.
- Remote access to your records.
- No paper records.
- Temperature alerts with Chomp Loggers.