Turn Your ‘Checking Your Plan Is Working’ Task Into an Ongoing Training Tool
Training your team on food safety shouldn't be something that only happens during onboarding or just before your verifier arrives.
If you're following MPI's Simply Safe & Suitable Food Control Plan, regularly checking that your plan is working is an important part of making sure your food safety procedures are understood and followed by your team.
And with a little help from Chomp, these checks can also become a useful ongoing training tool.
What does ‘Checking Your Plan Is Working’ mean?
MPI's Simply Safe & Suitable Food Control Plan requires you to regularly check that you and your team are making safe and suitable food and following the procedures in your plan.
There are plenty of ways you can do this, from reviewing your food safety records and checking procedures are being followed, to running food safety quizzes with your team.
These checks can help you spot areas where staff might need a refresher before they become bigger food safety problems.
What About Australian Businesses?
While Australian food businesses don't have the same requirement to complete a Checking Your Plan Is Working task, it can still be a useful addition to your Chomp setup.
Australian food businesses are required to make sure food handlers have the skills and knowledge they need to handle food safely. For businesses covered by Standard 3.2.2A, additional food handler training requirements also apply.
FSANZ recommends regularly reminding your team about food safety and providing refresher training to keep their knowledge up to date.
Adding a regular Checking Your Plan Is Working task in Chomp gives you a simple way to build those refreshers into your routine. You can use it to check your team's understanding, revisit areas where you've identified knowledge gaps, or reinforce training following feedback from an auditor or Environmental Health Officer.
And because you can choose how often the task appears, you can schedule it at a frequency that makes sense for your business.
Use Chomp to reinforce staff training
In Chomp, you can use the Checking Your Plan Is Working task to regularly test and reinforce your team's food safety knowledge.
And because you can now adjust how frequently this task is scheduled, you can set your checks to suit the needs of your business.
For example, you could temporarily increase the frequency if a verifier has identified a training gap and asked you to take corrective action.
Or, if you've identified an area where your team could use a little more training, you can create your own tasks in ChompHQ around that topic and schedule them as often as needed.
That might mean refreshing your team's knowledge around allergen management, cooling food safely, hand washing or another part of your Food Control Plan.
Turning Corrective Actions into better habits
If your verifier identifies a training issue, simply delivering training once doesn't necessarily show that the knowledge has stuck.
Regular follow-up tasks can help you reinforce that training, check your team's understanding and build better food safety habits over time.
They also give you a record of the steps you've taken, which can help demonstrate how you've responded to a corrective action at your next verification.
Review your tasks in ChompHQ
If you're a Chomp customer, head to Task Manager in ChompHQ to review your Checking Your Plan Is Working tasks and make sure the schedule works for your business.
You can increase the frequency when your team needs some extra training or create additional tasks for specific areas you'd like your team to work on.