In this La Vida exclusive, food safety expert Katy Elliott looks back on a year of food safety success — helping hospitality businesses achieve 5 star food hygiene ratings every time through her consultancy, 5 Star Food Safety. Having become a legend amongst hospitality business owners, she reflects on another storming year….
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
Well, it’s been an amazing year for my business. Before I started this business I was a hand-made food manufacturer, cooking meals for children’s day nurseries throughout the UK. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the time-consuming production processes, paperwork, red tape and a change into how nurseries were being run, it became unsustainable.
Looking back, one major problem was understanding all the terminology of UK food safety laws and rules. I found it so hard to comprehend and ended up utterly confused not thinking clearly or logically. I then had to get my head around food labelling, nutritional values.
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
When The Nursery Kitchen closed, I had time to think about all these food safety rules, food labelling laws and realised so many businesses don’t achieve a 5* Food Hygiene Rating and businesses which need full approval found it hard to understand what was required.
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
I began working on an easy-to-use system and it’s evolved over the last four years into a fail-safe system as long as staff follow the system. As with any system, it goes wrong when staff don’t follow the system. The system works especially well when the head chef is pro-active. If the head chef doesn’t want to work with me then, in turn, the other kitchen staff don’t follow procedures, then it all goes wrong.
It’s no good just signing documentation to say the cleaning has been carried out when it clearly hasn’t. This is falsifying records and once this happens, as with any system, it breaks down. It’s not the staff who suffer, it’s the business owner and I’m here to not only protect the public but the business owner as well. It’s their livelihood and so sometimes I do seem to upset staff but that’s because they’re not doing their job properly!
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
I’ve been involved in a few cases of suspected “food poisoning”. This is when a customer states they were ill after consuming a meal. As long as the restaurant has a complete set of records we can prove it did not originate from the restaurant. This is why my system works.
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
This year I’ve also designed and printed food labels. I have to ensure these are compliant and clearly show the allergens. It can be a complicated process as I have to know all the ingredients used in a product. My customers must inform me if they change any products as this could affect the allergens and/or the nutritional values.
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
I also work with a frozen food importer, a nationwide frozen food distributor and a Chinese food manufacturer. When dealing with this type of business, full traceability is required and they have to be able to recall an item instantly. Premises such as these require Full Approval and full traceability on all the high-risk foods they use.
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
To recap, 2 businesses have achieved Full Approval and a 98% success rate in businesses achieving their 5* Food Hygiene Rating. Sometimes businesses don’t achieve a 5*Food Hygiene Rating because there may be a maintenance issues, or the head chef is being inventive and hasn’t quite followed procedures during the experimental stage of producing a new menu.
So, it’s not always their fault or as bad as it sounds. Also sometimes chefs have forgotten to let me know a new piece of equipment has been bought into the kitchen and there’s no procedure in place. Things do get overlooked and no-one is perfect.
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
I also run a networking group to help small businesses achieve their goals. I run this with Dave Murphy and some help from Justin Hopper. It’s called In The Loop. This group is free to join and we all help each other. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting our fabulous Mayor and Mayoress, Cherry Povall and Sheila Clarke, and they’ve been fabulous in supporting our In the Loop events. I’ve had great fun being invited to their events too. In The Loop also supports some local charities.
So it’s been a busy year and I’ve met so many unique and different small businesses and interesting people. I can’t wait to see what next year brings!
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION WITH KATY CALL HER ON 07940314549 OR CONTACT VIA THE WEBSITE
