Factoring food safety into your business response plan

Businesses around the world are navigating unforeseen challenges around public health, brand reputation and customer trust during the COVID-19 pandemic. And food safety plays an important role in addressing these challenges. Working across multiple food industries, from production to grocery stores to restaurants, the Ecolab team is uniquely equipped to integrate safe food and healthy business operations.

And we’re dedicated to helping businesses across all industries – from farm to fork – adopt food safety best practices to maintain safe and resilient operations.  

So, in honor of World Food Safety Day on June 7, we’re highlighting how food safety practices will help businesses respond to today’s pressures.

Reopening restaurants

Restaurants around the world are rethinking operations as they reopen their doors. Some research is indicating that consumers will be looking for more food safety and sanitation signage, and that they want to see foodservice workers wearing protective gear when operations reopen.

Clean, safe and healthy operations are an essential part of protecting and building confidence with employees and guests. You can set up practices to help your team follow proper food safety habits:

• Make sure hand washing stations are visible, easily accessible and fully stocked
• Post signage in key areas to keep best practices top of mind
• Establish rigorous food safety on-boarding and training for new hires and returning staff
• Monitor employee health and encourage symptomatic employees to stay home

Reassuring shoppers in retail environments

As food retailers continue to supply essential goods, shoppers will likely have heightened concerns around the safety of stores and goods. By implementing and communicating practices such as disinfecting shopping carts, providing wipes and touchless payment, retailers can significantly reduce risk and help shoppers feel safe.

Delivering safe food

Food delivery services are evolving and growing at a rapid pace, and we developed programs to help restaurants translate their dine-in food safety protocols to new methods of delivery. Our assessments and solutions focus on employee behavior, safe preparation, temperature control and more, to give consumers peace of mind that takeout and delivery orders are prepared in clean, safe environments with contactless, tamperproof delivery. This helps you unlock new ways to serve guests while helping ensure every step of the process is safe, from prepping to packing to third-party delivery.

Training and safety in manufacturing facilities

Maintaining safe production environments, upholding food quality and safety standards and keeping employees safe and healthy remains a top priority for food and beverage manufacturing facilities. We’re driven to help address public health concerns by providing proper infection control solutions, training and compliance expertise. Manufacturing facilities can reinforce both personal and environmental hygiene with frequent hand washing, proper personal protective equipment and frequent cleaning and disinfecting. By reducing health and safety risks in manufacturing facilities, we help your business do what it does best: produce safe, quality food and beverages for the world’s food supply.

Disinfecting and sanitizing food prep and production environments

Food businesses of all types have seen increased guest or employee expectations around cleaning and sanitation. To support food prep environments like Quick Service Restaurants, we have heightened cleaning and disinfection programs, tools and expertise to keep you informed of and compliant with new and changing regulations

While “cleaning,” “sanitizing” and “disinfecting” are often used interchangeably, they describe distinct processes and results. Our new infographic is a helpful tool that reviews cleaning and sanitizing best practices. And remember to always read and follow label instructions.

With many factors to keep track of and consider, maintaining and prioritizing safety in business operations can be complicated. Having an effective food safety program can help businesses across a range of industries find what we’re all seeking right now: safety and peace of mind.