As a consumer-facing industry, the restaurant business is responsible for ensuring consumer safety as part of regular operations. This is on top of their obligations to their own employees, such as ensuring safe working conditions. Both of these responsibilities are ultimately represented by external standards that restaurants need to understand and comply with.
There are also several business challenges to manage when you’re running a restaurant. All these factors taken together mean that a restaurant business needs to be mindful of:
Food safety
Rule number one in gastronomy is to ensure all the food you serve is safe for consumption. This isn’t only about properly cooking everything, but also paying attention to shelf life, storage, fridge and freezer temperatures, and more.
A full list of food safety guidelines is represented in most HACCP checklists. HACCP is the system that most restaurants use to eliminate or stay ahead of any developing food safety risks. Details like exact temperature ranges and sanitation schedules are difficult to remember offhand, which is why having them written is essential.
Sustainability
Restaurants are often criticized for operating unsustainably, particularly when it comes to food waste. Gastronomy businesses deal with food in such large quantities that much of it goes unused, especially because of the risks associated with expired products.
Ensuring that you’re able to manage food waste effectively is a matter of first tracking the amount you’re actually wasting. Then you’ll know which products account for the bulk of unused food. From there, managing food waste is about understanding customer orders and customer volumes so you’ll be able to manage your inventory accordingly.
Work and kitchen safety
Restaurant kitchens can be hazardous working environments. When it comes to employee safety, key things to watch out for include extreme heat and any harmful chemicals used in cleaning. It’s easy for fires to break out, so you’ll want to make sure there’s at least one working fire extinguisher.
Because you’re working with and around lots of raw food products, kitchens are places where germs can easily spread, both to and from employees. Foodborne illnesses are disastrous not just to your employes, but to your customers and reputation as well, so it’s vital you take steps to prevent their development. Ensure everyone is wearing appropriate PPE when working.
Supply chain issues
Consistent and precise delivery is key in the restaurant industry, since ingredients need to be used on a daily basis, and many items are only good for a short time. But because of that precision, restaurants are also vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
Another way that supply chain issues impact restaurants is that ingredient scarcity leads to higher menu prices, which can turn away some customers. To an extent, disruptions are inevitable, but it’s always a good idea to perform supplier audits as a way of evaluating potential or current partners and ensuring they are reliable.
Running a restaurant business with Lumiform
Designing and tracking restaurant policies is a lot of work to handle manually. Pen-and-paper systems and documents are easy to lose or damage, and are often inconsistent from one iteration to the next.
Managing food safety, restaurant conditions, external partnerships, and more is easier with workflow automation software like Lumiform. Instead of juggling long paper lists, use the desktop software to create custom digital checklists or download an existing template, and then perform the corresponding inspection from your desktop or the Lumiform mobile app.
Use Lumiform to streamline the way you:
- Inspect kitchens for safety and food hazards
- Evaluate and improve waste management
- Manage inventory and supplier relationships
- Keep customers safe
- Stay aligned with food industry regulations
Every piece of data collected using Lumiform is securely stored in the cloud for you (and only you) to access at any time. That, along with weekly and monthly inspection analyses, makes drawing conclusions and understanding business performance simple and allows you to plan improvements.