Start taking a consistent, proactive approach to your line checks
Are you storing your meats at the right temperature? What about foods on standby — sauces and pre-cooked soups? Have the grills and fryers been cleaned? Are your line cooks washing their hands correctly? If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” or “we can’t always account for the people who don’t,” then you could be opening yourself and your restaurant to the risk of foodborne illness.
An Outbreak Will Hurt Your Business
Standardized, consistent food safety operations are vital to any successful restaurant. All it takes is one incident to severely damage your revenue, not to mention your reputation. Just look at Chipotle’s troubles with food safety in the last two years — a series of customers across the country contracted illnesses related to E.coli and norovirus, and it seriously damaged the fast-casual giant’s business. JP Morgan analysts estimate that those incidents cost Chipotle three full years of earnings growth.
And It Will Hurt Your Reputation
Furthermore, a report from business-advisory firm AlixPartners found that 28 percent of consumers would never eat at a chain restaurant affected by a food safety outbreak, and 62 percent would wait until the chain was declared safe again. Think about it — once the news of a few sick customers gets out into the public, it’s very hard for potential customers to forget about it. Sure, some guests will come back once your business is declared safe, but there will be plenty who can’t get that worry out of their heads.
That’s why it’s critical for restaurant operators to have a solution in place to help make food safety easy and consistent across your entire business, whether that’s one location or 50. If your restaurant has line checks split up across multiple notebooks or clipboards, that increases the chances of mistakes.
Keep All Your Checklists in One Place
The Manager’s Red Book allows you to store all of your checklists and food safety procedures in one book. Your managers won’t need to leaf through four different books to make sure they’ve completed the prep, storage, cleaning and server checklists. Instead, all of that information will be in one convenient location.
In a restaurant, food safety must be at the forefront of everybody’s mind — The Manager’s Red Book has checklists designed to keep your employees on track and create accountability. Cleaning and safety tasks will protect from food contaminations and ensure compliance with brand standards as well as federal and state guidelines.
And with the addition of the new Red Book Keep App, the digital companion to The Manager’s Red Book, your above store management will have more insight into the operations, so they’ll know that their people on the ground are completing the required line checks and delivering guests a safe, quality experience at all of your business’s locations. This user-friendly solution allows restaurants and hospitality companies to take their operations mobile, documenting the critical pages and tasks securely in the cloud.
You can’t afford to take a disorganized approach to your food safety procedures. It’s worth it for your business and the well-being of your customers to have all of the tools available to prevent outbreaks.
