Food Safety Focus | Keep Common Sense Common

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

This week I want to talk to you about something simple, yet profound: Common Sense. Veterans, please share your food safety knowledge with new team members as they come up in their learning to help make common sense common.  It’s hard to remember all of the trainings that happen at the beginning for new team members and some team members may have a hard time applying what they’ve learned to the real world.  So, they will need all of our help to come along the journey.  

All of us continue to learn as we go, even having worked in the warehouse for years, true, but it used to be common knowledge that the responsibility of making sure new team members knew what they needed to know was the responsibility of the supervisors, trainers and also the veterans – All of us.  The wisdom you carry is too valuable to let it end at you.

True, there is a way of going about it with kindness and the heart of wanting to help the team member be better at what they do and help the company be better.  Ignoring what new team members do or shaking our heads behind their backs does not help us be better as a company.

A recent example is I’ve seen cases fall off a pallet on the dock during receiving and instead of quickly picking up the couple of cases and tossing them on a spare pallet that was nearby, the cases were scooted closer to the pallet with their feet to stack back on the pallet…  Thing is it happened right in the middle of veterans that know you can’t slide cases across the floor with your feet to be stacked back on top of a pallet of product.

Or new forklift operators who are trying to back up and turn at the same time.  The forks get stuck in the pallet because they weren’t pulled in all the way while trying to turn at the same time and the pallet gets spun in the rack and it dumps through the racking…  We know we shouldn’t be doing more than one motion at a time, yet many of the dumped pallets I see on inspection have the pallet turned at an angle that shows it was spun or it was set down without making sure it was square.  Once, twice, ten in a warehouse?  A simple conversation can help save a lot of time fixing it later.

There are many issues that will come up and each of them will need all of us to help new team members understand how to be better and make common sense common again.

Thank you for all of you do to help us all provide safe food for our families, each and every Day!

Justin Straka Food Safety Manager

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Author: Trish Metts