Food Handling and COVID-19: What You Need to Know

publication date: Feb 1, 2021
 | 
author/source: Brian Evans
|
 

waiter


The last year has been one of adjustment for virtually every business in the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced industries and public health officials to revise their best practices and adopt procedures that are meant to protect both staff and customers from infection.

This impact has been felt acutely in the food-service industry where the interaction between staff, food, and customers is unavoidable.

Because all this revision has come at a break-neck pace, many restaurant owners/workers are scrambling to ensure that they have properly implemented the new guidelines.

To help restaurants determine if they are in compliance with the new guidelines, we've compiled this quick-reference guide for those in the food-service industry.

Practice Proper Hygiene, Social Distancing, and PPE

The first line of defense for restaurants when it comes to COVID-19 is to ensure that you have guidelines in place with regards to proper hygiene, social distancing, and PPE.

Some of these measures simply involve cultivating an increased work-place awareness concerning best practices that food establishments were already doing, while other practices are entirely new like social distancing.

Here's a basic checklist for your establishment.

Managing Food Pick-Up and Delivery

The second aspect of protecting you, your staff, and your customers from COVID is to establish a food pick-up and delivery system that incorporates social distancing guidelines. This can be implemented in different ways, but here are some ideas from the FDA.

These procedures and best practices certainly take some getting used to, but once they become the established norm for your business, they won't seem so cumbersome. This means that you can get back to what really matters, making great food for everybody to enjoy.



Brian EvansBrian Evans serves as National Sales Manager of Industrial & Safety at Justrite Safety Group, which owns NoTrax, a manufacturer of floor matting products and antimicrobial rubber cutting boards.




 
Previous | Next