What is Food Safety Training? And why is it important?

Today, I want to talk about what food safety training is and why getting it right is important.

Food safety training is essential for anyone working with food. It’s the process of teaching food handlers how to keep food safe to eat, ensuring that at every stage—storage, preparation, service, transport, or delivery—food safety is maintained.

It is a legal requirement for a food business operator to ensure that food handlers are supervised and instructed and/or trained in food safety. This means understanding the risks associated with handling food, how to control these risks, and essentially ensure they know how to use good hygiene practices so that you can serve safe food to your customers.

The importance of food safety training:

• Ensure satisfied customers and repeat custom
• A good reputation for your business
• Compliance with food safety laws
• Hopefully, increased profits
• A good food hygiene rating

The problem is, many businesses think that food safety training is just a checkbox to tick off to get a food hygiene certificate. But just having a certificate doesn’t mean staff remember or apply what they’ve learned. A boring food hygiene course could mean that people don’t even listen to it in the first place. Let’s face it, we’ve all done it. We’ve been told to complete some e-learning, we sit there scrolling through social media, checking our emails and then clicking next as soon as we’re able to.

I’ve seen it many times during inspections. A staff member has a food hygiene certificate but when the EHO turns up, they panic and make mistakes like putting raw meat into the fridge on the top shelf next to cooked foods or forgetting the cooking temperature and giving the wrong answer when under pressure.

Food safety training is more than just getting a food hygiene certificate. It’s about your staff actually learning how to work safely in practice so that it becomes a natural part of what they do, every single day.

Effective food safety training is likely to comprise:

1. Doing a food hygiene course to learn the basics of food safety. The more engaging the course, the better.
2. On the job training so your staff are clear how to ensure food safety in your business.
3. Supervision to ensure people are doing what they have been trained to do and refresher training where issues are found.

Even if your staff have up-to-date food hygiene certificates, if the EHO feels your staff don’t actually know how to safely prepare food, you will be asked to retrain them. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen many times over the years. So, why not get it right the first time?

Remember, when it comes to food safety training, you’re not just paying for a certificate. You’re paying for your staff to learn the basics, that you can then build on and make your business better.

If you think that a more engaging food safety training might help you in training your staff more effectively, check The Safety Expert’s Level 2 Food Hygiene Course that is taught by an EHO.