Don’t Make These Restaurant Health Code Violations

Health code inspections aren’t something to take lightly as they can have repercussions for your business.

If you want to make the health inspector happy every time as well as your customers, don’t make these restaurant health code violations.

In this article, we look at some common mistakes and ways to avoid them.

Common Health Code Violations

There are many common issues that you can steer clear of with a little training and effort.

1. Personal Hygiene: How clean are your employees? Are they wearing gloves and hairnets? Do they have their cell phones nearby (they shouldn’t because they are germ-filled)? Teach your employees how to wash their hands. This means for a good 20 seconds up to the elbows and under the fingernails. In addition, your cooks should wear clean uniforms daily.
2. Food Storage: Cross contamination is your enemy. If your food storage isn’t controlled well, you will violate the health code. This happens most commonly when juices from one food item drip on another. For example, if beef drips on chicken, you’ll need to toss both. Store like items together, but if you’re storing vertically in a walk-in, always put veggies on the top, followed by cooked veggies, cooked meats, cooked seafood, raw seafood, raw beef, raw pork, and then raw chicken.
3. Cross Contamination: This can happen in more areas than food storage. For example, if your chef throws three burgers on the grill and then goes over to cut lettuce without washing his hands, you are in violation. Always use different cutting boards for raw meat and veggies and have hand-wash stations available.
4. Time and Temperature: know what foods are safe at room temperature and what foods should be refrigerated. For example, mayonnaise should be refrigerated. But, do you know how long it can last there? Always keep cold foods below 40 degrees and hot foods above 140 degrees. All foods need to be refrigerated after a certain amount of time out on a counter.
5. Storage and Use of Chemicals: What are you using to clean your kitchen surfaces? Are they reusing cloths? Are they trained on your particular cleaning chemicals? Where are they being stored? Your health inspector has very specific rules on these. Make sure your team knows how to sanitize a surface the right way and then store the chemicals (hint: not near food).
6. Storage of Plates, Glasses, and Silverware: None of this should be near food. In addition, everything must be stored upside down and silverware stored covered. Instruct your staff to only store the handles, rims, and stems. They should never touch a utensil where a diner would.

Now let’s look at that health inspection.

Things to Know Before a Health Inspection

You’ll find in most cities that your local health department will conduct health inspections anywhere from once to four times a year.

You want to be prepared every time by following the regulations every day of the year.

But, if you know your time is up, and the health inspector is on the way, review the regulations and your food standards to make sure you are protecting your restaurant.

How to Prepare for the Health Inspection

You can use a tool called the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points Plan) to prepare for your health inspection.

By using this system, you can identify points in your cooking process and kitchen areas where the risk of contamination is the greatest. In addition to the HACCP plan, you can take some additional steps to get ready.

• Watch for safety issues. Things to look at include expiration dates, personal hygiene, internal temperature requirements, and cross-contamination.
• If you don’t know, check with your local health department for the regulations and forms so you know just what the health inspector is looking for when he or she arrives.
• Do your own random inspections and don’t tell your staff when you’re doing it. Because the health department can show up un-announced, this is good practice for both you and your team.
• Once you do your own random inspection, schedule a meeting with your employees and make sure they know what wouldn’t pass and how to fix it.
• Do random quizzes with your staff. Ask safety questions and find out if they know the regulations as well as you do. Do they know, for example, you can’t store chicken and vegetables in the same containers?
• Continue to evaluate your staff. They are on the front lines and initially responsible for staying up to date on the regulations. Make sure to continue random inspections and quizzes.

Dos and Don’ts During the Inspection

Because anyone can pretend to be a health inspector, make sure you verify your inspector’s credentials. In most instances this person will volunteer them to you before you ask. If you are unsure, call the health department to verify. (tweet this)

Always be respectful of the health inspector. Treat this person as you would any guest in your restaurant. Give this person full access to your restaurant and space to do his/her work.

Stay with the inspector so you can view any violations. You may be able to correct some of your violations immediately, which is a bonus for you. Your health inspector will record this as fixed on the spot, so you aren’t getting an out of compliance score.

If you don’t understand the violation, ask for more information. Try not to be argumentative. Use your conflict resolution skills to get more information so you can resolve any issues.

After the Inspection

You will get an inspection report from the health inspector, usually with grades attached.

Read this report very carefully. Go over it with your staff. Then, fix all of the violations you had immediately.

Your local newspaper often reports these violations (and its online version), so you want to make sure you fix them, so customers will keep showing up at your door.

While you can correct some of these immediately during the inspection, others may take you a bit longer. They may also require a re-inspection. So, don’t let too much time go in between the first inspection and the re-inspection. (tweet this)

If you had to change some things and were in violation be sure to provide ongoing training to your food staff. Verbal training as well as signs everywhere can help.

To Conclude

Getting dinged for health code violations can spell disaster for your restaurant, especially once word gets out.

You can bet your customers don’t want to eat in a dirty or otherwise unsatisfactory restaurant.

If you have any violations, fix them straight away. Make sure you know how each violation occurred and why. Talk to the offending staff members.

And, as we mentioned before, continue with your own ongoing surprise inspections.

Finally, if you don’t agree with a violation, you can always appeal it.

Take your health inspections as learning opportunities. After all, you don’t want to spread illness, and you want your customers to be safe.

By avoiding common health code violations, you can help solidify your success.

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Images: Photo by Fabrizio Magoni and Jason Briscoe on Unsplash