What Are The Risks?

Background: Why Every Restaurant Needs a Food Safety Plan in your Food Handler Certificate course covers the theory. This lesson shows you how to apply it to your own Food Safety Plan.

Objective: By the end of this lesson, you will be able to describe the real risks of serving unsafe food. You will be able to:

• Name the people most at risk.
• Describe the human, legal and business consequences of an outbreak.
• Identify the most common causes in restaurants.

Who gets hurt

Foodborne illness can be mild for a healthy adult and fatal for others. The highest-risk groups are young children, older adults, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems. Allergic guests can react within minutes to a trace of an allergen.

What it costs the business

• Medical costs, lawsuits and higher insurance premiums.
• Closure orders, fines and public inspection reports.
• Lost customers and bad reviews that stay online for years.
• Staff time, discarded food and cleaning costs.
• In the worst cases, criminal charges and the end of the business.

The usual causes

• Time and temperature abuse: food left in the danger zone, slow cooling, poor reheating.
• Cross-contamination from raw to ready-to-eat food.
• Poor personal hygiene and ill workers.
• Undercooking.
• Food from unsafe sources.
• Allergens not identified or not separated.

Every one of these is preventable. Your Food Safety Plan exists to make sure they are controlled every day.