Food safety in hotels is crucial. From hotel restaurants to room service and minibars in guest rooms, maintaining high food hygiene standards is essential to delight your guests.
No one wants to face a low hygiene rating, like a luxury Oxfordshire hotel recently did. Despite its opulent setting and popularity for weddings, its reputation was marred by a poor hygiene inspection, with significant concerns raised about food safety management.
Ensure your hotel food safety paperwork is up-to-date
Confidence in safety management is critical when an Environmental Health Officer visits your hotel. You need to have all temperature data, cleaning schedules, maintenance checks, and staff training records readily available to assure the inspector that your guests are well-protected.
Saving all these checks and records digitally can simplify your life, eliminating the hassle of sifting through piles of paperwork and reducing the risk of losing important documents. Food safety software will centralise all food safety checks, tasks, and schedules for a more streamlined and efficient approach.
Buffet food safety
Food safety in hotels often involves managing buffets. To maintain excellent hygiene standards, ensure you have proper systems and procedures in place. Keep food covered until it’s ready to be served and use individual utensils for each dish to prevent cross-contamination between dishes and guests.
Always ensure food is cooked to safe temperatures using accurately calibrated thermometers or digital food probes. And remember buffet food must not be left out at room temperature for any longer than 4 hours, but most businesses adopt the 2-hour rule: ensuring food is disposed of after 2 hours to ensure safety.
Room service food hygiene
Food prepared on your premises must adhere to standard food safety rules regarding temperature, cleanliness, and avoiding cross-contamination.
Additionally, implementing a specific room service checklist can help your team ensure everything is perfect before delivering food to guests. This checklist should include ensuring all food is covered until served, conducting extra temperature checks, verifying cutlery cleanliness, and ensuring the safe transport of food from the kitchen to the guest’s room.
Don’t forget the minibar
Many hotels offer rooms with minibars, making it essential to have a proper maintenance schedule to ensure they maintain the correct temperatures. You never know what leftovers or snacks your guests might want to store safely! Avoid potential safety hazards by ensuring your minibars are always compliant.
Consider adding minibar temperature checks to your daily cleaning routine or minibar stock checks, or create a new customised digital checklist. It’s always better to be safe than sorry, so don’t leave minibar temperatures to chance!
Regularly review your HACCP
Having a strong HACCP in place is essential for food safety in hotels. However, experts recommend that you regularly review and improve it as new hazards may arise and new procedures might be needed. Whether you have renovated some kitchens, rooms or even gardens, review your HACCP and make sure all safety risks are considered and minimised.
Consider centralising all safety tasks into one digital system
Finally, let’s talk about making food safety a breeze! Running a hotel (or multiple) can be a juggling act, especially if your hotel(s) offers a variety of foodservice options – from restaurants, bars and cafes to in-room dining and banqueting. Why not simplify things? Having an integrated digital system makes it simpler and more effective to implement and monitor food safety compliance across all of your kitchens.
Navitas Safety’s digital food safety solution simplifies your food safety processes and kitchen management with a unique combination of software and automated hardware. Eliminating time consuming paperwork and admin tasks. In fact, for a standard hotel restaurant you could be saving up to 20 hours a week by automating your food safety tasks with Navitas Safety. That could equate to over £1000 a month saved, per kitchen, and for a hotel with multiple food service operations and several sites, that’s a huge saving!
To find out how Navitas Safety can help you with hassle-free food safety, request a chat with one of our specialists or email Hello@navitassafety.com
