The chef jacket post got me thinking about food safety and well how different it is from the manufacturing side of things to the restaurant side of it...
I have worked on both sides of the industry and have a wonderful (really no sarcasm at all) job in a food plant and it is a far cry from the restaurant world...
This is food plant life....
First of all it is paperwork hell and that is all for traceability in the event of a recall... I have to document every lot code, case number, date received, amount used etc etc etc in everything I do and it is all about being able to trace a single ingredient back to its origin in the event of a recall from one of our suppliers or worse us... and that would involve a few firings as if we had to do a plant recall it would mean we were not doing things to code and yep...firings would happen...
We are issued uniforms from an approved supplier and they must stay inside the building as do our work shoes. If we are to leave he building....even if a smoker wants a quick smoke he/she has to change into their street clothes before going outside....same deal applies if we want to leave to buy lunch...gotta get changed up.... Needless to say I am lazy to change so I make sure I bring my lunch and enough snacks to keep me for the day .....
We clean and well we scrub. Not the spray on and wipe off kind of clean or scrub but the fill a bucket with cleaner and dump it on the table, scrub it with a hand brush for at least five minutes, hose it off and squeegee the results down the drain, sani thte table and move on... that is how we have to clean... all the time....
Then there is the logs....we have cooking logs, cooling logs, packaging logs, production logs, metal detection logs, shipping logs, receiving logs and I am sure there are more and again...paperwork hell all in making sure we can trace every last gram of stuff back to its source so we can account for everything in the event of a recall..
We also have to inspect and document our findings pre operational (before production) and mid operational (during production ) and sign off on the cleanup at the end of the day.... again lots of checklists but a good resource in the event of a recall...
Before we can enter the production area we have pass through a sanitation zone and we get hit with sanitizer mist and walk through a boot wash sani foam...
We have two sani zones in the plant..one in the meat room and the other in the vegetable room...
And they give us tear away aprons to wear in those zones to keep things as clean as possible under the legislation we must follow...
We have sign in and out sheets for knives so they can be traced and it is all about preventing cross contamination....
I know this sounds extreme and I have only just touched on what we do...but well we do all that to keep us safe and the manufactured food we all eat safe for us,...
And then I look at restaurant kitchens that I used to be a part of and just shake my head..... we have to be over the top because of the law but no one ever died from a cook having a break outside in his kitchen clothes......
I have worked on both sides of the industry and have a wonderful (really no sarcasm at all) job in a food plant and it is a far cry from the restaurant world...
This is food plant life....
First of all it is paperwork hell and that is all for traceability in the event of a recall... I have to document every lot code, case number, date received, amount used etc etc etc in everything I do and it is all about being able to trace a single ingredient back to its origin in the event of a recall from one of our suppliers or worse us... and that would involve a few firings as if we had to do a plant recall it would mean we were not doing things to code and yep...firings would happen...
We are issued uniforms from an approved supplier and they must stay inside the building as do our work shoes. If we are to leave he building....even if a smoker wants a quick smoke he/she has to change into their street clothes before going outside....same deal applies if we want to leave to buy lunch...gotta get changed up.... Needless to say I am lazy to change so I make sure I bring my lunch and enough snacks to keep me for the day .....
We clean and well we scrub. Not the spray on and wipe off kind of clean or scrub but the fill a bucket with cleaner and dump it on the table, scrub it with a hand brush for at least five minutes, hose it off and squeegee the results down the drain, sani thte table and move on... that is how we have to clean... all the time....
Then there is the logs....we have cooking logs, cooling logs, packaging logs, production logs, metal detection logs, shipping logs, receiving logs and I am sure there are more and again...paperwork hell all in making sure we can trace every last gram of stuff back to its source so we can account for everything in the event of a recall..
We also have to inspect and document our findings pre operational (before production) and mid operational (during production ) and sign off on the cleanup at the end of the day.... again lots of checklists but a good resource in the event of a recall...
Before we can enter the production area we have pass through a sanitation zone and we get hit with sanitizer mist and walk through a boot wash sani foam...
We have two sani zones in the plant..one in the meat room and the other in the vegetable room...
And they give us tear away aprons to wear in those zones to keep things as clean as possible under the legislation we must follow...
We have sign in and out sheets for knives so they can be traced and it is all about preventing cross contamination....
I know this sounds extreme and I have only just touched on what we do...but well we do all that to keep us safe and the manufactured food we all eat safe for us,...
And then I look at restaurant kitchens that I used to be a part of and just shake my head..... we have to be over the top because of the law but no one ever died from a cook having a break outside in his kitchen clothes......