Week 3

I completed my Quality Sanitation and Safety Inspection assignment this week with Kevin Barker. We headed to Couch at around 11 am to check out the main serving lines and kitchen. We arrived a few minutes before the Couch Restaurants opened. Kevin told me he always just observes first to see what employees are doing, if they are washing hands, if the sanitation buckets are set up correctly. He also told me particular things to look for when doing an assessment. One of the things he stressed was food temperature logs. Besides getting the temperatures of foods on the line, it’s important for that the dining hall restaurants keep logs of food temperature before it is set out on the line. If a food item is under temperature on the line then we can find out what temperature it was at before-hand. There is about a two hour time period to take corrective action before the food needs to be thrown away for food safety reasons.

Another item that was brought up was the sanitation solution. An interesting thing I learned while going through this Safety Assessment was that in using quat solution there needs to be a special rag to use with it. A cotton rag immersed in quat solution actually neutralizes the solution making it ineffective. There were a few sanitation buckets that had cotton rags in it instead of sanitizing cloths. As soon as we found this, Kevin made sure to tell the student managers and Couch Restaurant about this so they could fix it right away and re-enforce it. The other common problem found with these safety inspections is having “magic bullet” towels lying around. “Magic bullet” towels are towels that might be used to wipe up one area and then end up lying around a counter top. While it is okay to use cotton towels to wipe up spills, they should be thrown in the dirty rag bin once done being used.

I definitely learned a lot by following Kevin around and completing the Sanitation and Safety Inspection. It was good to see how corrective action was taken right away to keep foods at safe temperatures.  

The rest of the week was busy. I spent the rest of the week at Couch Restaurants with Sam. I was trained at Freshens which was pretty fun. I made several smoothies and dished out several bowls of frozen yogurt. I was also busy preparing recipes for another event Dot had coming up the S.W.E.E.P. event; Safety Wellness Environmental Emergency Preparedness. We needed to do recipe development for the recipes I found - Fresh Salsa and Strawberry Mango Salsa. I was able to get that completed and put the recipes into CBORD so we could send out the order. Overall, it was a successful week.