Consider these Hygiene aspects to handle food in your business

You have a bright new idea of a swanky restaurant or eatery, and you decide to take the plunge into business. Raw materials check. Staff – Check. Location – Check. Advertisements – check. Hygiene precautions… missed?

Or, you want to start your own business of pickles. You don’t take into account the need for following hygiene practices like gloves, headgear etc….and it becomes difficult to implement when your business grows.

People heading eatery businesses often miss out on this very basic aspect of food handling – personal hygiene of the staff. By the time they realize the need for training employees for hygiene, it’s quite late. Instances – like a stray hair sticking out of the food, to some unwell cook spreading his illness to his customers as well – come up and threaten the credibility and image of your business.

So how can this be controlled?

The answer is, train the food handlers to maintain hygiene. Be it a restaurant or food processing companies, people often groan about wearing a head cap, or face mask. But, it is extremely important to implement, else the business would end up being a carrier for diseases!

Here we bring to you important aspects that need to be kept in mind for hygienic food handling in your businesses

‘Hairy’ Issues

Human hair is a physical and a bacterial contaminant that can get into food (e.g., hair in soup). Thus, headgear(like Hats and hairnets) and beard nets keep the hair off of your forehead and your face – the new haircut should not be visible to anyone inside the kitchen!)

Aprons and clean clothing

Imagine you need to wipe you wet hands, and you absentmindedly wipe it on your dress that has sort of become a hand towel for you. Not only is it gross, it compromises the hygiene. Dirty clothing should be changed immediately. Contrary to popular belief, light colored clothing while cooking or handling food is beneficial since it is easier to see the dirt.

Hands and Nails

Ladies! It is known that you’re tempted to keep your fingernails long and have them painted with nice colors. While men like to flaunt their fancy watches while at work.

Sorry, but it’s an absolute no-no in food business! Nail polishes contain substances that may get mixed with the food or make the nails chip and fall on the food. On the other hand, rings, bracelets and wrist watches can become a home to a variety of germs.

Sick leaves need to be used, not saved

Sick employees can be a major threat to the food they’re handling , even though they could be considering themselves brave enough to come for work despite their illness.

Before you enter food business – be it food processing or eatery – ensure that you have all these checks in place so that all your customers remain happy and safe.

Chew on this: the risks of smokeless tobacco

In a much-needed measure to keep the consumption of chewing tobacco under check, the Delhi government has extended by a year the ban on the sale, purchase and storage of all forms of chewable tobacco — scented, flavoured and mixed — sold in forms such as gutka, pan masala, khaini and zarda. The extension of the ban has come after the previous notification expired recently. In 2012, a few States, beginning with Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, banned gutka just months after the notification of the Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restriction on Sales) Regulations, 2011 came into effect. The FSS Act clearly states that “tobacco and nicotine shall not be used as ingredients in any food products”. By the end of 2012, all of 14 States had banned gutka, and in 2013, following the Supreme Court’s direction, gutka was banned in all the States. Besides gutka, 11 States including Delhi have over a period of time banned flavoured chewing tobacco, and three States — Maharashtra, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh — have banned flavoured areca nut too. There is a strong case for all States to ban pan masala as manufacturers have effectively sidestepped the FSS Act by selling chewing tobacco and pan masala in separate sachets. Also, the rampant surrogate advertisement of pan masala products has made a mockery of the ban on gutka. The biggest blow for tobacco control in India, which has banned the advertisement of all tobacco products, came through the amendment of the Cable Television Networks Amendment Rules 2009; in contravention of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the amended Rules allow for the use of the brand name or logo of tobacco products for marketing non-tobacco products.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, functioning under the WHO, had stated in a 2008 monograph that “areca nut is carcinogenic to humans (Group I).” In India, areca nut is the “second most consumed” carcinogen after tobacco. Also, many of the flavouring agents used in pan masala, a cunning mix of natural products and chemicals, are dangerous substances. So what is preventing the Central government from extending the scope of the amended FSS Act to include areca nut and thereby ban the sale of pan masala in India? After all, the number of smokeless tobacco users in India is alarmingly high at 206 million, as estimated in an August 2012 paper in The Lancet. Unlike in the case of smokers — where less than 10 per cent of cigarette-users are women and a little over the same percentage consumed bidis — about 50 per cent of consumers of smokeless tobacco are women, according to the 2009-2010 Global Adult Tobacco Survey. The number of oral cancer deaths caused by chewing tobacco is alarmingly high. According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, about 100,000 new oral cancer cases are diagnosed every year and nearly 50 per cent of these lead to death within one year of diagnosis. It’s time the government came down heavily on chewing tobacco.

Checking quality of food is also important

While serving food free of cost is for a good cause, the organisers also check the quality of food. B. Murugan of Nizhal Maiyam said that he stopped distributing leftover food to orphanages and homes as he came to know that some of them stored and served it to children the next day.
“At times the food was spoilt and it posed a threat to the health of the children,” he said.
When he gets a call on leftover food, he shares contact details of orphanages and homes with the donors. Padmanaban Gopalan of No Food Waste said that they collect food and bring it to their two centralised collection points in the city where it is tested and tasted before it is distributed to the deserving.
“We maintain temperature of food above 60 degrees and ensure that it is consumed in less than four hours,” he said. According to him, less than two per cent of food they get is not good for consumption.
Food safety officials said that they have not checked the quality of food served free of cost.
“We believe that people only give food that they can eat, to others. We have not received any complaints of ailments suffered by homes or orphanages by eating food served to them by sponsors,” the officer said.
Stating that they have to check quality of food even if it is distributed free of cost, the officer added that they will check it, if there is a need.
While checking food quality at the source point is not possible as food is collected from various places, the authorities could consider checking it at the end point before the deserving people eat it.

DINAMALAR NEWS