When it comes to food safety, what your employees know, what they believe, and what they do are all crucial to the protection of your customers from foodborne illness.  Learning some interesting trivia and teaching points about foodborne disease factors, microorganisms, and how they grow or get into food might help.   

The World Health Organization (WHO) published a helpful document in 2006 that emphasizes simple training points for crew level food workers and their managers in several languages.  It also contains some quizzes, a glossary, and printable charts that might be helpful to you in a training meeting.  It’s called “The Five Keys to Safer Food Manual.”  World Health Organization, Five Keys to Safer Food Manual, available at 

http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/consumer/manual_keys.pdf (2006). 

The Five Keys to Safer Food manual, available as a free PDF download from the WHO website, presents five key messages for safe food handling:

1. Keep clean,
2. Separate raw and cooked,
3. Cook thoroughly,
4. Keep food at safe temperatures, and
5. Use safe water and raw materials.

CDC’s 5 Top Causes --The WHO’s five points are not random advice, but correspond with the five top causes of foodborne illness, as identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

1. Poor personal hygiene,
2. Contaminated equipment,
3. Inadequate cooking,
4. Improper holding temperatures, and
5. Food from unsafe sources.

International Food Safety vs. Your Regulations -- These messages represent excellent priorities for training.  WHO presents a flexible set of content revolving around the five key points for safe food handling.  Because the content is developed for international use, review these points against your own health code/standards (i.e. The FDA Food Code or your state food code) and adapt accordingly if you decide to use them as aids in your next staff meeting.  Also the WHO document uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit for temperatures, so refer to the FDA Food Code which contains both on every temperature reference, so you don’t have to convert it.  

•         Fahrenheit danger zone:  41°F to 135°F

•         Celsius danger zone:  5°C to 57°C

Do your employees believe the food safety information they hear?  Checking what staff believe is important, because face it—if employees don’t believe your sanitation procedures have value, the best procedures will fall flat. Disbelief can lead to behavior in which an employee follows procedures when you’re watching, and doesn’t when you’re not.

When employees do not agree with the food-safe messages and believe in their value, you know you have some persuading to do.  How?  Adult learners are most likely to respond to a combination of explanations (“Give me the real reason for the rule”) and experiences (“Help me understand what it will be like if I don’t follow it”).  Making the reasons real is challenging because we are talking about hazards that are generally invisible such as microorganisms and how many organisms that can make someone sick are on your hands.  Also, food safety hazards are related to practices that are hard to visually catch every time when someone does them wrong, so learning and using a safer way to do a food task is the message.

Making the Message Real - Here are visual ideas to help illustrate the hazards of microorganisms for your crew members:

• It takes 1 million microorganisms to cover the head of a pin.  Hold up a pin, touch it to a piece of raw chicken, and ask what’s there. If this were a contaminated surface, the answer might be: 1 million germs that could make us ill.   Remind your learners that not all microorganisms are pathogenic (cause disease).
• Now, hold up a teaspoon of soil. How many germs here? The answer is: 1 billion.
• Draw a square inch on your hand with a felt-tip marker. How many germs here? The answer is 650,000.
• Do you have a calculator handy? How many illnesses could that square inch of unwashed hand cause?
• How many germs (bacteria or virus particles) does it take to cause illness? The answer is: Numbers vary by microorganism, but sometimes as few as 10 or 20.
• Some of our most prevalent foodborne enemies are viruses (e.g. Norovirus and Hepatitis A).  Viruses are 1000 times smaller than bacteria and cannot be seen on a basic microscope – we need a highly sensitive electron microscope.  Norovirus and Hep A are considered to be low dose organisms (10 to 100 viral particles to make someone sick).  So that’s really small organisms.
• To demonstrate how rapidly bacteria multiply under favorable growth conditions, try this idea: Bring out a bowl of dried beans. Now, set out one dried bean on a table. In 15 seconds, make it two. In another 15 seconds, make it four. In another 15 seconds, make it eight. Each 15 seconds, double the count. (Under prime conditions in the danger zone, foodborne bacteria counts will double every 15 minutes, so consider this a high-speed demonstration.)
• Handwashing training -- Use training products such as UV fluorescent powder or cream ( a number of products are commercially available) and a black light to represent bacteria on your hands.  Apply the UV powder or cream, wash your hands as you think you do at work, and see how well you actually wash your hands.  Look especially on fingertips and under nail beds.   An enlightening demonstration. 

Bottom Line:  Check out the World Health Organization document.  The quizzes are interesting and helpful.  Food safety regulations internationally do have some variations, but the reasons behind prevention of foodborne disease are universal.   If you need food safety training documents in various languages besides English, go to this website and scroll to foodborne illness: 

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/internat.html          

‘Til next time,