A change in perspective and strong internal communication can be crucial in preventing restaurant foodborne illness, several industry quality assurance and risk management executives recently said.
Ana Hooper, vice president of total quality at Darden Restaurants Inc., was among the nearly 30 industry executives, academics and public health officials who gathered for the 10th Annual Nation’s Restaurant News Food Safety Symposium sponsored by Ecolab. The event held Oct. 4-6 in Newport, R.I., featured an update about outbreak surveillance technology, a look at ill-worker studies, educational panels, peer-to-peer roundtable discussions and networking activities, such as a bay cruise.
Hooper spoke of how her Orlando, Fla.-based company — operator of more than 1,500 casual-dining restaurants across multiple chains, including Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse and Yard House — years ago changed the name and mission of its “quality assurance” department to reflect a more proactive strategy centered on “total quality.”
“We reached a point where we asked ourselves why we were testing [for adulterants] more than 4,000 products a month and what were going to do when we found something in these products,” Hooper recalled during the “Training & Creating a Food Safety Culture” educational panel. “And we realized we really needed to flip the process around and put the preventative controls in place — building quality and safety in the front end, not in the back end.”
She said it is also critical for food safety to constantly communicate with upper management on the topic — a theme repeated by several symposium speakers.
“It’s a continuous conversation of understanding and engaging their leadership and their support, because without it, it will not work,” Hooper maintained.
Cindy Jiang, head of global food safety and supply chain compliance for McDonald’s Corp. of Oak Brook, Ill., agreed that “we, as food safety professionals, need to tell our management what their role is in food safety” and bring safety issues and information to the chief executive. Her company operates or franchises more than 36,000 restaurants worldwide.
Jiang said anonymous surveys and restaurant staff interviews by third parties can help operators assess their food safety cultures and understand what messages workers are gleaning from management actions and whether employees are being rewarded for good behaviors. The latter point is important to food safety, she said, because “we don’t want to just talk about it when something went wrong.”
Courtney Halbrook, director of quality assurance and food safety for Chili’s Grill & Bar and Maggiano’s Little Italy parent Brinker International Inc. of Dallas, said “see it” is one of the “steps to accountability” within her company’s corporate culture.
“‘See it’ is hearing the hard things and [seeing] the reality of the situation. That works great in food safety,” Halbrook said.
McDonald’s Jiang observed that creating a food safety culture “is a long journey, it is not a project.”
Even if it takes time, “you need total team buy in” to perpetuate food safety, Eric Marcoux, senior director of quality assurance at Smashburger in Denver, said during another panel session. “We need both sides — the paperwork side and the operations side — to believe in the cause.”
Keynote speaker Craig Hedberg, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, highlighted how health authorities see mining social media, such as content from Twitter, Facebook and restaurant review websites like Yelp, as a possible tool in early detection of foodborne illness outbreaks. Some initial studies provided “credible evidence” that such monitoring for illness chatter could be effective, he said.
Hedberg explained that the tremendous amount of information flowing through such social media channels can produce a signal-to-noise ratio that’s “quite large.” He speculated that developing automated algorithms to filter out all but the key signals needed by health departments is “something that will be going on for some time.”
For now, Hedberg said, “We would be better served by trying to get these people who already recognized that they are part of an outbreak to report that directly to the health department rather than stew about it in a social network.”
Both Hedberg and “Supply Chain Matters” panel speaker Ernest Julian, chief of the Center for Food Protection in the Rhode Island Department of Health, stressed the growing importance of whole genome sequencing, or WGS, which shows the DNA makeup of an organism. They said that increasingly used technique is helping researchers better understand dangerous organisms and enabling outbreak investigators to find clear links between sick patients and the contaminants turned up in tests of suspected foods or food production facilities.
Working while sick
Jonathan Barkley, a public health epidemiologist with Rhode Island’s Center for Food Protection, summarized findings of ill-worker research conducted by several public health agencies, including his, released in three reports between 2011 and 2015. The studies, he said, involved 491 workers and 387 managers from about 50 randomly selected restaurants in each of nine states.
Barkley said approximately 20 percent of the workers reported working at least one shift while experiencing vomiting or diarrhea during the previous year and 12 percent said they worked two or more shifts in that condition. He added that 15 percent of the workers and about 60 percent of the managers had paid sick leave.
One significant finding, Barkley pointed out, was that workers at restaurants that served more than 300 meals a day, when compared with the reference group of restaurants serving 100 meals or less, “were eight times more likely to report working two or more shifts while ill.”
Other factors with a significant association with workers working sick, he said, included that a restaurant had a manager with less than four years of experience; lacked a policy requiring workers to report if they are sick; and lacked on-call replacement workers. Also uncovered: Men were more likely than woman to work sick and, in the majority of cases, workers themselves, not their managers, made the decision that they would work while ill.
“Working while ill is complex and multifactorial,” Barkley said.
“Nearly 44 percent of the respondents surveyed did say that not having sick leave or whether or not they had sick leave would influence their decision to work while ill.”
Barkley said 70 percent of managers reported working while ill, with 10 percent reporting that they worked with vomiting and diarrhea.
Sharing food safety best practices, Lionel Bisson, director of quality assurance for Friendly’s Ice Cream LLC, said the approximately 280-unit Friendly’s family-dining chain requires all directors of operations and key franchise contacts to be certified as ServSafe course instructors and exam proctors.
All employees of the Wilbraham, Mass.-based chain complete an e-learning module that includes food safety elements, are issued a pocket food safety guide and, must annually read and sign a communicable disease reporting responsibilities form, he said.
According to Bisson, Friendly’s “tools for changing behavior” include a “30-minute shake” drill every half hour that includes cleaning and stocking bathrooms and kitchen work areas, washing hands and changing gloves, and strategically placed labels displaying correct holding, internal cooking and equipment operating temperatures. Also ‘tools,’ he said, are hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP) monitoring and check lists.
On the food allergy front, Friendly’s servers get allergen awareness training, among other steps that Bisson said include requiring managers to prepare foods going to guests reporting allergies.
Ron Ruggless and Jenna Telesca contributed to this report.
Contact Alan J. Liddle at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @AJ_NRN
