What is a Food Safety Management System and Why Should I Have One?

Food safety is one of the most important aspects of food service; without adequate food safety, you're not going to have customers, sales, or even permits to run a food establishment or related business. Food safety goes beyond just storing and cooking things properly. As a food service manager, you'll need an actual safety management system in place to cover all your bases, from the basic handling issues to urgent, last-minute events like recalls.

What Is a Food Safety Management System?

A food safety management system helps you track food safety and quality from the moment you receive the food to the moment it's either consumed or thrown out. These systems ensure your kitchen equipment continues to work properly through regular inspections and maintenance, which ensure food is not left out too long by tracking preparation schedules throughout the day. This is also the system that helps you keep track of which distributors and wholesalers have sent which products -- because if something is wrong with those products, you need to know whom to contact and whether to stop working with them.

Most importantly, though, a food safety management system helps you keep track of warnings and recalls. If you get your vegetables from three different suppliers, and one supplier issues a foodborne illness recall, you need to know which products to pull so that you can continue to sell the others while keeping customers safe. Knowing exactly what is happening with a recall or warning also allows you to inform customers, who may have already eaten those products, of what to do.

In addition, if a food safety problem is tracked back to your establishment, you may be able to provide investigators with enough data to put together an effective recall that protects other consumers.

How Are These Systems Relevant to Food Service Management?

Put simply, food service managers are responsible for making everything work and stay safe in a food service business. Yes, all of the workers form a key part of the system, but the managers are the ones who put the system into place and ensure all of the workers are following protocols correctly.

Food service managers can't afford to not have a food safety management system. The process of keeping food safe for consumption and removing food that is not safe is too complicated to wing it. Something is going to slip into a crack and cause a problem if there isn't a set system in place.

Why Is Formal Education so Important for Food Safety?

You could learn about basic food safety on the job or through independent study, such as what new food service workers often have to do before taking a state food handler's exam. But for a manager, formal education as part of the culinary and food service schooling is essential.

Formal education helps student managers understand the latest food safety news and thoughts, which are ever changing. For example, for years, undercooked pork and runny eggs were forbidden, not just for pregnant people and those with compromised immune systems, but for everyone. Now, the thinking is that pink pork cutlets may actually be OK to an extent. But food service managers need to know where to draw the line with serving pink pork -- who should not eat it? Where is the minimum temperature for cooking now?

Food service managers may also have to deal with workers and customers from different countries where standards may be very different. This can lead to confusion, say, between a British chef (the UK's Food Standards Agency announced in 2016 that runny eggs are once again alright for everyone to eat) who has joined your restaurant, and U.S. restaurant inspectors (the FDA still recommends not serving runny eggs unless pasteurized eggs are being used). If a food service manager understands the latest recommendations, they can spot conflicting attitudes quickly and solve the situation before the next inspection.

Formal education also helps managers understand the technical jargon in warnings and recalls, which enables the manager to explain to customers why a particular product is no longer available, or why a similar product wasn't removed.

How Can a Food Service Management Student Get This Education?

If you want to move into food service management, look for a program that specifically delves into food safety management. Find a program where it is integrated so you see how safety and service work together.

Are you interested in food service management? If you want to earn a Bachelor of Science in Food Service Management, ECPI University's Culinary Institute of Virginia offers this degree at an accelerated rate. For more information on this exciting program, connect with a friendly admissions representative today.

It could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!

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