Hazards exist in every industry and workplace. For the food service industry, identifying and addressing potential hazards early will help minimise the chance that you will be fined or even worse – be forced to shut your doors due to an incident or non-compliance.
Hazard identification and management is crucial to protect your employees, customers and ultimately, your bottom line!
In this blog, we cover:
- common food business hazards
- 4 steps every food business owner should take to identify them, and
- how to get on the front foot to prevent them!
Why it’s important to proactively identify and manage hazards
Whether you receive a complaint via council or directly from a customer, it’s important that every food business has a hazard management process in place.
By documenting (or providing proof) of the measures you’ve taken to proactively reduce the likelihood of an incident occurring, you’re far less likely to be fined by council for non-compliance.
Common hazards in food businesses
While the list of hazards in any commercial environment might seem daunting, the key ones for food businesses include:
- Food safety and handling issues
- Structural maintenance
- Equipment maintenance
But it’s not all doom and gloom, managing hazards and ‘risks’ in your business doesn’t need to keep you up at night.
How to identify hazards in your food business
The four-step process for identifying and resolving hazards is to:
- Identify the hazard – what is the hazard in relation to and how severe is it?
- Fix the hazard – implement steps to control hazard (your critical control points).
- Sign off hazard rectification – if hazard occurs, what is the corrective action?
- Prevention – what chance can be made to internal processes and procedures to prevent the hazard from occurring again?
Hazard management plan – a simple solution
As part of Food Agent Australia’s Food Safety Program (a service we provide direct to food business owners), we complete a comprehensive review of your food, premises and equipment including (but not limited to) food handling operation, temperature control, food storage handling and customer complaints to identify any potential issues that may arise.
We also provide our clients with easy-to-use operational templates that ensure record keeping is thorough and sound.
Our Food Safety Program also provides you with detailed steps on identification, rectification and prevention of hazards.
Find out everything you need to know about a food safety plan here, or give us a call today on 0400 901 920 to find how we can help your business.
