Food Safety First

Color Coordination Enhances Safety

In America's restaurant kitchens, today's hottest trend is color coordination. But it's food safety, not fashion flair, that has foodservice managers thinking in color.

Once limited to day-of-the-week rotation labels and cutting boards, color coordination is spreading throughout the kitchen to cooking utensils, brushes-even mops and mop buckets. Color-coded knives, in particular, are quickly gaining currency.

"As restaurants try to increase margins by turning out more meals, it's easier for kitchen workers to make mistakes relating to food safety. In these busy environments, color-coded systems that segregate foods and work areas are an effective solution,'' says Theresa Hunter, national sales representative for DAYDOTS International.

Many foodservice operations are adopting broad color-coding systems. When it comes to utensils, for example, they may assign a specific color, such as green, to the knives, tongs and cutting boards used to prepare vegetables. Utensils used to prepare meats may be assigned the color red, while poultry utensils are yellow. This lets harried kitchen workers know-with just a glance-which utensils to use.

Knives and tongs with separately colored handles are slightly more expensive than traditional utensils. But most kitchen managers will justify the expense, since an outbreak of food poisoning costs a restaurant an average of $75,000. With this high cost in mind, many restaurants are expanding color coding across the kitchen. Some are even color coding mops and cleaning buckets to ensure that rest room cleaning equipment never enters foodservice areas.

"Expanding the color-coding system to include cooking utensils and even sanitation equipment is a logical next step in a food safety program,'' Hunter says.

Color coding can serve another important purpose, particularly for the fast food industry. At restaurants with constant employee turnover, managers have little time to train workers in food safety procedures. Color coding can reduce some of this training time. When the kitchen operation is color coded, workers soon learn to focus on the colors-the system guides them as much as they guide the system.

With the enormous pressure on restaurants to stay competitive, food safety can be more difficult to guarantee than in years past. Color-coded rotation labels, cooking tools, brushes, and even mops and buckets provide an efficient way to maintain a focus on safety-no matter how busy it gets in the kitchen.

Contributed by Jack Flanders and Theresa Hunter, DAYDOTS International, Fort Worth, TX