Health and Safety for Restaurants and Catering

Restaurants and Catering occupy a special place in health and safety matters. Not only do employees of your establishment need to work and be protected according to health and safety regulations, but the work that they do has an immediate bearing on the health and safety of your customers.

Not surprisingly, the UK government takes particular care in setting standards and monitoring compliance in this sector. The work of Environmental Health Officers (EHO) is predominantly concerned with food standards and checking health and safety for hotels and food suppliers, as well as for restaurants and catering.

As the owner or manager of an organisation dealing in food or catering, you can expect visits from your local EHO. Food and hygiene regulations in the UK change on a regular basis, employees may also come and go, and the EHO needs to know that you are keeping up to date.

So how do you find the right balance between guaranteeing that impeccable service that your customers expect and demand, and making the investments in health and safety to ensure that you are within the guidelines – and still make a profit?

It’s a question that we are asked time and again by our restaurant and catering customers. Our answer is simple. In the restaurant and catering business, if you follow the health and safety regulations correctly, you will make more revenue. Our consultants in ProActive Health & Safety have worked with a wide variety of customers to prove this point.

The underlying reason is that health and safety standards typically make your products and services more appetising, more satisfying and of course healthier. Your customers like your food better, and so they buy more from you.

However, “simple” doesn’t necessarily mean “easy”. Food and hygiene regulations in themselves are detailed and subject to change, not to mention the challenge of ensuring that every member of you food preparation, packaging or service staff is well briefed. Insurance can only do so much to protect your company’s business.

Restaurants and catering locations depend upon their customers and word of mouth to keep them in business. In serious cases of health and safety problems such as food poisoning, your insurance might take care of a lawsuit, but you could still go out of business for lack of patronage afterwards.

That’s why ProActive Health & Safety consultants who are specialised in the restaurants and catering sector can help you on both counts: being sure to observe food and hygiene regulations; and making a sound investment in health and safety that will give you a good business return as well. We are also flexible about how we work with you.

We understand that different restaurant and catering organisations need different levels of service, and that where full-time presence might be justified for one, part-time or “as-needed” may be more suitable for another.

When we work with our customers in this sector, our consultants will usually take care of aspects concerning the creation or updating of a health and safety plan, auditing your restaurant or catering company to prepare for satisfactory EHO inspection, implementing an HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) monitoring system, and training of your teams on HACCP and food hygiene.

And even though prevention is better than cure, they will also review food complaint procedures to help you to better handle any issues and resolve them to the satisfaction of all.

We’ll also take care of the elementary things that are still so critical, such as fire risk assessment and making sure that your employees know where the fire extinguishers are and how to properly handle any kitchen incident. And while we’re doing this for you, we’ll have an eye on how you can also see the benefit flow down to the bottom line for your company.

Like to know more about making health and safety into a real asset, and not just a legal obligation? You can phone us on 0161 935 8282. Tell us a little about your restaurant or catering company, and our consultants can give you an overview of the advantages that working with ProActive Health and Safety can bring you.