A Pilot Study of Knowledge and Practices of Safe Foods Handling in the Catering Industry

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: The incidence of foodborne illness has steadily risen in the United States in recent years. The majority of these illnesses can be prevented by safe food handling practices. Education of foodservice providers and inspection of their practices are an important part of reducing the incidences and spread of foodborne illness. The nature of catered events makes it difficult to keep food safe for human consumption. Typically, caterers must prepare food and then transport it to a different location for consumption. Also, many caterers hire part-time, temporary, or contract employees who may not be trained in proper food handling techniques. The long-term goal of this research is to improve catering employees' knowledge of safe food handling techniques and their use of such techniques in catering operations to help prevent the spread of foodborne illnesses by these establishments. It is also anticipated that obstacles to catering employees adopting safe food handling practices will be identified during this project. The primary outcome of this project will be the development of educational materials specifically designed for catering employees. These materials will include training plans, instructional materials, and short tests which will be available in print, as well as via a web-based system, to increase the availability to and access by catering operators.

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APPROACH: Collect data regarding the current level of knowledge of catering employees using a questionnaire. Divide catering operations into two groups based on their responses: knowledgeable and not knowledgeable. Observe catering employees during the preparation, transportation and serving of food during events to determine if they are putting their knowledge to use in the workplace. Record incidents of improper food handling procedures during catered events. Analyze incidents to understand the common problems occurring. Develop training aids describing safe food handling techniques in four areas: inadequate cooking, improper holding temperatures, contaminated equipment, and poor personal hygiene. Divide each of the previous groups into two sub-groups: test and control. Train catering employees in the test group with the newly developed training aids. Employees in the control group will receive no additional education. Observe employees' practices on-the-job and record incidents of improper food handling. A pre-test/post-test with control group method will be used to determine if there was an improvement in the use of safe food handling practices after the educational materials were implemented.
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PROGRESS: 2003/09 TO 2006/08 <BR>
During Phase I, the researchers went to catering events, distributed food safety surveys (in English and Spanish), and observed sanitation practices. The researchers created two observation worksheets. The Event Site Observation Sheet asked 20 questions concerning the set-up of the event site. The Occurrence of Violations Observation Worksheet contained check off boxes for the number of violations in 42 different areas divided into the same four categories as the food safety survey: personal hygiene, cooking foods, holding foods, and equipment. After Phase I, the researchers identified the most common areas of lack of knowledge and adherence to food safety standards. Based on this data, they developed a brief food safety guide (in English and Spanish). During Phase II, the researchers asked caterers to distribute the food safety booklets to their employees and to have them read the booklet before the observed events. The researchers and their staff of students observed 23 catering events during Phase I and 46 events during Phase II of the project for a total of 69 events where 188 catering employees were surveyed. Employees earned a mean score of 69.6% on the 20-question survey. They were most knowledgeable about personal hygiene, but did not practice proper hygiene during the catering functions. The most common food safety violations were not checking food temperatures, not properly covering foods in warming and/or refrigeration units, not wearing gloves when required, and not washing their hands. The researcher's intent was to determine whether reading the booklet improved the employees' food safety knowledge and decreased the numbers of violations during the observed events. However, the researchers were unable to make statistically significant comparisons since few booklets were actually distributed to employees by catering owners/managers. Instead the researchers most significant finding was that the performance of employees, regardless of their food safety and sanitation knowledge (based on the survey results), was less than stellar. Many employees knew what proper procedures were but failed to follow them during the execution of an event, either in the kitchen or in the dining room and regardless of whether the function was on-premise or off-premise. This lack of employee performance was also evident regardless of whether they were working at corporate or independently catered events and whether the worker was a part-time or full-time employee of the caterer. The researchers found the most significant error made by catering employees was the lack of personal hygiene practices; more specifically, the lack of proper hand washing. Also of concern was the fact that when moving food to or from warming or refrigerated equipment, employees were not checking the food temperature. Lack of interest and concern about bad publicity prevented many caterers from participating in the study. The presence of observers during a catering event could have affected employees' performance.
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IMPACT: 2003/09 TO 2006/08 <BR>
The results showed need for improvement in both knowledge and practice and significant differences in knowledge between English and Spanish speaking respondents and employees of independent versus corporate operations. It is important to get better participation rates from caterers in order to make information like that collected more generalizable.