Prime Skills

What is a restaurant or catering business without its top chef? What is a chef without waiters and waitresses to serve their fantastic food? It’s definitely not one of the finer food businesses in town.

Teamwork plays an important role in the food safety business. With one part of its whole missing, the food business no longer functions as one smooth operation and guess what? This doesn’t only include the staff!

The leader must also be a part of the team whether this is making sure all wait staff, cooks, chefs and other key players is all on the same page or through demonstrating how tasks need to be completed.

A great example of poor teamwork is the famous Hell’s Kitchen television show with Gordon Ramsey as the star. Ramsey is renowned for his bad temper, use of profanity and degradation of anyone in his kitchen. While this is surely great for the network ratings and brings a lot of attention, it’s also a great example of what can happen in a kitchen without teamwork present or the leader setting a solid example.

With a crowded kitchen during a restaurant’s busiest time, the atmosphere can get tense. There’s waiters rushing in and out, bringing in orders, taking them back out; too many cooks and not enough chefs and that forever short period of time the food must be prepared before the customer gets angry.

If a sense of camaraderie isn’t established before the shift begins, then rank in the kitchen takes over the feeling of being part of the team. The end result of that can be disastrous causing a lack of helpfulness towards each other, leaving each to their own task and basically asking for potential accidents to happen in or outside of the kitchen.

This video is a little silly but it presents a good message of what happens when people work in restaurants alone rather than working with each other:

Kitchens are definitely a challenging place to work which means that motivation must be put at the top of the priority list. This is because the two most powerful motivators are trying to make a difference and the opportunity to work closely with others to achieve a common goal.

This doesn’t mean hold a cookie on a dangling string in front of your staff; it means care about getting to know your employees so that you can lead and inspire them to become better at their profession. It’s a completely natural feeling for people to work extremely well together when there’s motivation present.

Managers have to provide the motivation by fully training their staff, spending time on the floor with their cooks and giving constructive criticisms instead of degrading, sardonic remarks when someone isn’t performing up to their standards. It’s up to the staff to carry out their responsibilities while staying attuned with their colleagues. It’s a simple thing called respect.

There’s no way around the chaos that will ensue but if respect formed as a mutual bond amongst staff, from employee to supervisor and vice versa, motivation will stay high. This little shift in the professional kitchen paradigm will have everyone working together as a well-oiled team, not to mention, keeping the kitchen running as a smooth operation.

Every fine restaurant wants repeat happy, satisfied customers. The only way to acquire that is to start working as a team from the bottom of the faculty chain all the way up to the top of the management line!

Teamwork is a continual loop that shows teamwork can never be underestimated in ANY company – especially in the professional kitchen!

Most people have pieces of jewellery that they were regularly and some, like wedding rings, that they never take off. In the kitchen, however, taking off jewellery is extremely important for yourself and others in ways you may have never even thought of!

In professional kitchens, it’s a requirement that staff aren’t allowed to wear jewellery such as watches, earrings and necklaces when preparing food. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule that include wedding bands and medical alert bracelets BUT gloves must be worn at all times for protection. If there is a religious bracelet that an employee can’t remove, it will have to be managed by taping and remaining covered with protective work gear.

One of the main reasons watches and jewellery may not be worn around food are the dirt and bacteria it collects and spreads. Even if the jewellery has been cleaned and sanitised, it may catch other microorganisms that are lying around or from raw foods like uncooked chicken.

The other main reason jewellery is banned from food service kitchens is the potential hazard of a piece of metal or gemstone that could possibly fall off and into the food that’s being prepared. The last thing any reputable food company wants is customers with chipped teeth, broken teeth or internal cuts and lesions inside of their mouths!

Contrary to what people might believe, jewellery is very hard to completely clean out all of the germs and microorganisms that hide in the chain links or under those precious stones. Just because it looks sparkly doesn’t mean it’s sanitary.

Jewellery is worn for many different reasons; whether it means something sentimental or it defines how a person looks. The main thing to always remember, though, is to save beauty for outside of the kitchen because inside, food safety matters a heck of a lot more!

Every job has a dress code; whether it’s for business attire at the office, a logo filled collared shirt for the cable man/woman or hair netting and gloves for kitchen employees. A uniform represents a personal standing within the company as well as oftentimes, useful for other purposes such as safety and hygiene assurance.

In any food working environment, great, personal hygiene and safety of the employee and consumers goes a long way in food safety. One way to encourage as much cleanliness in the professional kitchen as possible is to require uniform practices that help prevent bacteria from spreading in the food preparation area.

It goes without saying that all kitchen staff are required to come to work clean and wear clean, uniformed clothes and coverings when working with food. If you’ve ever noticed chefs and cooks in the kitchen when dining out, their uniform consists solely of all white. It seems a little silly to those not in the food business that white, the easiest stained colour of all, is used in one of the messiest professions out there. The reason behind it is very interesting though: Safety.

Not only can white be bleached (pure sanitation) every time it’s washed but white is also the most reflective colour which helps keep heat at bay for cooks to stay cooler. Also, these white coats don’t have your typical plastic buttons on them; rather, they contain knotted buttons that don’t melt and are easy to unbutton should a flame or oil accident occur.

You might think, in such a hot kitchen, why do food service employees wear long-sleeved coats? Again, the answer is: Safety. Long sleeves help protect employees from getting burns from boiling liquids or accidental oil spills while also protecting happy customers from flakes of dead skin, drops of sweat or body hair from ending up in their food.

Ideally, work clothes should be long-sleeved and light-coloured (to show the dirt) with no external pockets.  Long sleeves protect both the food and your arms, prevents skin from touching food and helps to stop hairs, fibres and the contents of pockets (which can carry bacteria) getting into food.

When working with raw poultry or other salmonella carrying food, aprons are then typically used over the white chef uniform so that it can be removed without requiring a time-consuming, full change of clothing. Also, to follow any health regulation required in any country, long hair is required to stay tied back while also wearing disposable hair (and beard) nets and rubber gloves.

A good idea to help keep up the sanitation of a professional kitchen is to enforce employees to only put on their kitchen uniforms once they’ve arrives to the food prep area and removed once their shift is over to avoid tracking in dirt and bacteria from the outside. Since reputable food companies need to keep their customers healthy and food-poisoning free, these uniforms, hair nets and gloves are an absolute must!

While hand washing is very effective at preventing the spread of infection by wiping out bacteria as well as cross-contamination of foods, it is less than adequate for getting rid of many viruses such as hepatitis A and protozoa.  One out of every five cases of food-borne illnesses is caused by an infected worker’s hands coming into contact with food, so;

Clean gloves are a better choice than unclean hands.

However, it has not been proven that the use of disposable vinyl, latex or non-latex gloves is a safer method of handling food compared to effective hand washing techniques.  Wearing gloves can lead to a false sense of security and safety and can more than likely cause food contamination if hands are not washed and air dried prior to putting them on; so this can result in cross contamination from raw to high risk food in the same way as it does with hands.

Defects in a significant number of gloves, such as pinholes or punctures, enable bacteria from the hands to pass through the gloves and may result in contamination of high-risk foods with large numbers of pathogens.  Latex gloves can also produce allergic reactions in some people.

The hand environment created by wearing gloves provides the ideal conditions for the growth of bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus.

Cleaning hands before putting on gloves and frequent disposal of gloves minimises the risk for food contamination.

It is good practice to wash hands thoroughly after gloves have been removed as pathogens may have multiplied significantly while the gloves were being worn.  Some workers tend to wear the same pair of gloves for extended periods and it is that complacency that could account for the failure of gloves to prevent bacterial contamination.

Therefore the use of gloves could be counterproductive because workers might tend to wash their hands less frequently.

Food handlers with gloves are more aware they are handling high-risk foods and therefore are less likely to scratch their head and pick their nose or all those other bad hygiene practices that can lead to the spread of bacteria.

It therefore appears that a multi-tiered approach will offer the best protection.

Food service workers need to be educated about hand washing, using proper gloves and preventing ill employees from preparing food. They also need to be provided proper training in proper hygiene with a system put in place for monitoring compliance.