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Health and Safety should be a top priority for every business in the food sector. By keeping on top of your health and safety obligations, you will maintain the confidence of your customers, ensure the well-being of your employees, limit waste, and reduce costly downtime from compliance issues.
The experts at Telsen are here to help you navigate the sometimes complicated compliance landscape. Here are some of the most common challenges you’re likely to face and our best advice on how to meet your obligations, protect your customers, and ensure food safety success for your business.
There is a huge variety of business types within the food sector, but most face a handful of the same typical health and safety challenges. By understanding and preparing for these common issues, you can successfully meet your health and safety compliance obligations.
The first step to maintaining health and safety compliance in your food business is an established set of policies and procedures that provide key information about your business practices and set clear expectations for your staff. These should include detailed policies on food handling, storage, and preparation, cleaning procedures, and equipment instructions.
This can be a challenge for many businesses due to the time required to establish and communicate robust health and safety policies to staff. Telsen can support you through this process with paperless workflows and an automated Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan to flag non-conformance and resolve issues quickly.
Even if they’ve done an excellent job of detailing procedures, many food businesses can still get tripped up by a failure to support their policies with comprehensive and ongoing staff training. To ensure health and safety compliance, your staff need to have a detailed and current knowledge of your facility and tailored guidance on best practices for your business. This includes guidelines around handwashing and personal hygiene, sickness and injury management, and the use of personal protective equipment.
Meet and maintain regular training goals with Telsen’s automated staff training schedules and reminders that will keep your team up to speed on every aspect of your health and safety journey.
Food manufacturing and hospitality businesses can be dangerous spaces. To maintain health and safety compliance, it is important to implement control measures to protect your staff, suppliers, customers, and the public. These may include safe practice guidelines, personal protective equipment, or specialised staff training.
To keep your business safe, implement detailed policies around injury prevention and treatment - be sure to keep first aid kits on site - and establish clear reporting procedures to document any injuries and detail measures that can be taken to reduce the risk of them happening again. A HACCP plan is a critical component of injury and risk reduction, which Telsen can help you automate to track hazards and make changes proactively.
One of the most common hazards in any food sector workplace is the risk of contamination. While this can be a challenge to manage, there are a few key steps to ensure that your food preparation, handling, and storage areas are contamination-free.
Ensure that all use-by dates are checked upon delivery and clearly indicated on any food that is kept in storage.
Maintain optimum refrigerated, frozen, and cooked food temperatures by using thermometers and food probes. Telsen can provide continuously monitored sensors for your cold storage spaces to flag any temperature variances as soon as they arise.
When preparing food, use a separate area for raw ingredients, and colour-code chopping boards to indicate which ones are to be used for raw and cooked items.
Prevent cross-contamination by establishing and maintaining robust cleaning practices for all food preparation, handling, and storage spaces. Utilise cleaning schedules and checklists to ensure that staff are keeping an eye on cleanliness at all times.
Even new and well-maintained food businesses can be susceptible to equipment and facility failures. To keep everything working as it should, implement regular inspections and preventative maintenance throughout your facility. Get instantly notified of any facility failures or variances with Telsen’s real-time IoT sensors that provide 24-7 monitoring for temperature, sound levels, air quality, and more.
One of the biggest challenges for any food business is maintaining cleanliness. With good staff training, established cleaning practices, and regular monitoring, you can keep your business tidy and meet your health and safety compliance obligations.
Telsen can help you do this with ease by automating your cleaning schedules as workflows with checklists and reminders to keep your staff on track.
Keep your equipment and food handling, storage, and preparation areas clean with regular maintenance, paying particular attention to areas where raw food is handled.
Ensure that your staff maintain a high level of personal hygiene, including clean clothing, regular handwashing, immediate illness reporting, and use of personal protective equipment, such as hairnets, when required.
Implement a comprehensive pest management policy to ensure that pest control is carried out properly and regularly.
Do not allow waste to accumulate, and wherever possible, keep it in sealed containers that are easy to clean and disinfect. Ensure that waste does not cause a direct or indirect source of contamination.
Don’t let all your hard work to maintain health and safety compliance be undone by poor record keeping! Without comprehensive details of your business policies, training and maintenance records, and best-practice guidelines, you are likely to repeat past missteps and your business is at risk of a bad food safety inspection result. Keep up-to-date, written records of all your health and safety compliance information; if you’re struggling with the admin, let Telsen help you with automated, detailed audit trails.
Health and safety compliance is critical for your business, but it doesn’t need to be daunting. By keeping a close eye on these common challenges, you can get ahead of any health and safety obstacles before they occur.
If you need a little extra support, learn how Telsen can automate and streamline your health and safety compliance with paperless workflows, digital schedules and checklists, automated reporting, temperature control, and continuous monitoring. Book a demo today and let us show you how!