Food Safety Focus | Awareness Part 2

News | 08-03-2022

Food Safety Focus

Hello All!

I hope this message finds all of you and your families safe and well.

Last week we spoke about product awareness with a story to illustrate how strange it would be to see in our home life, the errors we often see happening in the warehouse. I’ve illustrated this same scenario with new hires for years to help bring to focus what we do on a daily basis, before they feel overwhelmed by the fast pace around them.

When it comes to going to the store to buy food and storing it correctly at home (pantry, fridge or freezer), people generally do a good job of this for themselves, every day. It doesn’t take many times of wasting food and money for people to learn to pay attention to what food to buy and where food should be stored. I don’t remember ever finding milk stored in the pantry of a friend’s house or seen someone buy grape juice for their cereal because they weren’t aware it wasn’t milk. If people get the right food out of their own fridge for themselves all the time, why is this so easy to do at home and so hard to do at work? One reason may be that we identify the food we use at home better than we identify the food we handle at work.

When selecting, it’s like we are picking out items from our own pantry, fridge or freezer. The customer gives us a list of what to grab, true, but it’s the same concept. We wouldn’t grab food off the shelf at home without looking to make sure it’s right. When we are receiving, we are inspecting food that is brought to us on a trailer, just as we inspect the food we buy at the supermarket. One by one, we inspect each pallet of product; checking the food to make sure it’s what we wanted and in good shape before sorting it so it can be put away in the right area. When we store products, we are putting the food away in the right areas just as we would for ourselves at home.

We use many numbers in combination with letters in the warehouse to help us be as exact as possible when it comes to managing our inventory. Lot numbers, locations, PID numbers, product codes, check digits, etc. all help us manage our inventory and processes, but should never take the place of good common sense. Being familiar with the product will help to understand how to handle the products we care for and help us catch unintentional mistakes, like products being tagged wrong or put in the wrong location on the pickline.

Thank you so much for all you do every Day!

Justin Straka
Corporate Food Safety Manager

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Author: Trish Metts
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