Food Safety First

Panda Express, a big take-out player, knows that food safety in the kitchen is a critical element in HMR food safety.

Editor's Note: As part of Best Practices' continuing Food Safety To Go series, we are focusing on one of the newest and most significant aspects of foodservice for our highly mobile society-home meal replacement (HMR).

As the pace of consumers' lives grows more hectic, the market for prepared food eaten in the home is burgeoning. Home meal replacement has become a catch-phrase for food available from a variety of retail outlets as diverse as restaurant take-out and delivery to supermarket delis, convenience stores and even hospitals. As more operations offer prepared foods to go, the HMR options for consumers are becoming increasingly more diverse. And, while operators recognize that their food can replace a home-cooked meal, they also know there is no substitute for stringent food safety measures. In fact, because of the unique flow of food for HMR, food safety is particularly important for this type of foodservice operation.

"The health and welfare of our consumers is our number-one priority," says Glen Helton, director of operating systems at Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, Atlanta, a division of AFC Enterprises, which also owns Churchs Chicken. About 60 percent of the chain's business is take-out, and a key concern is that once food leaves its establishments the company can no longer control its safety. "If a customer decides to leave our food on the counter all day, we're at their mercy."

However, according to research conducted by several top chains, consumers usually eat food intended for HMR within 15-20 minutes of purchase-well within the time limits for safe food. There's always the chance, though, that consumers will mishandle food.

So what can you do to ensure that safely prepared food is still safe when consumers eat it at home? Fortunately, there are many options, from carefully scrutinizing the food safety policies of vendors to educating consumers.

Monitoring temperatures of hot and cold foods is critical for service as well as take-out as shown at this Panda Express.

When preparing foods, especially potentially hazardous foods such as raw meat and poultry, follow these safe handling procedures:

• Prepare foods in small batches to prevent time and temperature abuse.
• Avoid cross-contamination by using separate preparation areas for raw and ready-to-eat foods. If that's not possible, schedule the preparation of produce and other items before employees prepare meat, poultry and seafood.
• Use color-coded utensils and cutting boards designated for specific foods.
• Wash and sanitize all food contact surfaces before and after each use.

Many restaurant and foodservice operations are taking extra steps to ensure safe food preparation. Popeyes, for example, isolates raw product from all of its already-prepared food areas. Chicken is first washed in a special chlorinated bath that is iced to maintain product temperature. Units have separate sinks for seasoning and battering chicken, and employees wear special gloves when handling raw chicken. Each preparation area has its own handwashing and sanitizing station and the fry production is kept separate from other food production. Employees are not allowed to cross over from one function to another.

At Churchs, chicken is prepared in the cooler and taken through a separate cooler door to a portable batter and breading unit on the cooking line. Only one person per shift handles raw chicken, and raw product is held at the breading station for only a short, specified time.

Leeann Chin, a 57-unit chain based in Bloomington, Minn., has a different approach to food safety-the units use no raw proteins at all. Instead, the small restaurants, geared predominantly to take-out, receive refrigerated shipments of food that have been prepared in the company's central commissary. The 30,000 square-foot production plant is a USDA-inspected, HACCP-based facility that uses a cook-chill system to prepare all protein dishes. Produce is also washed and cut at the facility. Units prepare and assemble menu items by rethermalizing cooked foods and cooking vegetables in a steamer, wok or fryer in small on-site kitchens.