safefood is encouraging small food businesses to sign up to its free food safety e-learning training tool – safefoodforbusiness.com – as new research reveals almost two in three (64%) small food businesses say they are extremely concerned about the impact of a poor food safety audit or enforcement on their business.
The research also found that just under half (45%) of food businesses claim that ‘food safety and ensuring compliance with regulations’ is their top priority. While the majority (72%) of food business owners/managers believed they are very knowledgeable about food safety, only 52% feel that their staff are very knowledgeable about the issue.
Introducing the training, Trish Twohig, Director of Food Safety with safefood said: “We know that running a food business comes with a long list of to-do’s and that training can often go on the back-burner due to competing demands; more than half (58%) of the business who took part in our survey said that finding time was the biggest challenge for them when it came to staff training. The cost of training was the next biggest challenge for more than one in three food businesses (39%). To help with that, we’ve created safefoodforbusiness.com. It’s free, flexible and all online to meet the needs of food business owners and managers.”
“When we analyse those who access training at ‘safefood for business.com,’ more than two in three (67%) are learners from the food retail or catering industry followed by almost one in five (17%) in education and 14% working in food or feed processing and production. With more than 3,000 unique users already, this reflects the real demand that’s out there among food business owners and managers to provide training that’s commensurate with the demands of their staff.”
safefoodforbusiness.com has been designed to be practical for small food businesses and used short training modules with real-life scenarios. Because managers and small-business owners can track staff progress while training, it is ideal both for new staff as part of their induction process, as well as re-training staff returning to the industry or as a refresher training.
Seany McCleary from Blasta Street Kitchen based in Monaghan added “We’ve been in business since 2017 and finding the time for food safety training can be challenging. We used safefoodforbusiness.com recently with our team and it’s great – being free and online means it’s really flexible for our staff to do on phones or laptops. I can also check online to see how they’re getting on. As a small business owner, it gives me a lot of confidence.”
Covering eight key topics, safefoodforbusiness.com has been developed with the user in mind, to be easy-to-understand and engaging by using multimedia formats and interactive learning modules. Based on safefood’s collective experience and the latest research available, the topics included in the training are:
- The importance of food safety
- Food microbiology
- Temperature control
- Personal hygiene
- Cleaning
- Allergen Control
- Pest control
- HACCP
To sign up for ‘safefood for business’ visit www.safefoodforbusiness.com
