Food hygiene - Your guide to food hygiene
Food hygiene is essential for all businesses handling food. Not only is food hygiene important for obvious health and safety reasons, but it also plays a huge part for those who suffer from food allergies.
Practising good food hygiene is crucial for those who suffer with food allergies due to cross contamination. Preventing foods from being mixed when they shouldn’t be helps protect against many health and safety risks, as well as food illnesses such as salmonella and food poisoning.
Food hygiene best practices are pretty common sense. When looking at the best ways to prepare food, there are a few key factors you should consider. From protective clothing, cleaning, chopping boards and knives, and more.
The first thing people in kitchens and workers in the food industry should be aware of is COSH. This is the abbreviation: Control of Substances Hazardous to Health. This provides workers with the information they need to ensure that chemicals and products that should not be ingested are stored and used in a safe manner. Make sure you follow these rules and recommendations for each chemical and substance as mishandling a product could cause serious side effects for the one who ingests it.
This is a common question when it comes to food hygiene best practices. While in theory gloves may be thought of as more sanitary, however, gloves can lure you into a false sense of hygiene. If you do use gloves for food prep, be sure to change them regularly.
Clean hands are always more hygienic than gloves that are used multiple times. Remember to wash your hands between each contact you have with different foods, in particular, raw and uncooked foods.
When handling food, part of good hygiene is to protect yourself and others. This includes wearing aprons or other clothing to protect your outdoor clothes. Ideally, kitchen staff have separate uniforms they wear when working in the kitchens, this is then washed at the end of each shift. This protects foods from contamination from outside sources.
Cross contamination is essential for kitchens and food operatives to avoid in order to have a safe working environment. Cross contamination happens when foods or other ingredients and items make contact with each other. This can be from spillages, not washing hands, using the wrong equipment and more.
Cross contamination can happen quickly and can be detrimental to those who suffer with food allergies. It is essential that businesses ensure they do all they can to prevent cross contamination for food hygiene best practices.
Food separation is one of the processes which helps prevent cross contamination. This means you use the relevant chopping board and knives for the food you are preparing. Not only should you separate foods during prep, but you should also ensure that foods are stored in the correct place in the fridge and other storage areas.
Separating foods and items is key when practising good hygiene in the kitchen or food prep areas.
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