The food arrived properly and it is stored properly. Now the part that no fridge setting can help with: the people touching it. This topic has the shortest rules in the course and the hardest one to actually keep, and the hard one is not about technique at all — it is about what happens to somebody's pay when they say they are ill.
🧼 Handwashing, and why it keeps failing
The technique is not the problem. Almost everybody in a kitchen can describe handwashing correctly: soap, warm water, twenty seconds of actual scrubbing including between the fingers and under the nails, rinse, and dry on something that is not their apron.
What fails is the occasions. Hands get washed at the start of a shift and after the bathroom, and then a whole service happens in between. The list of moments that actually matter is longer and much less intuitive:
- After handling raw meat, poultry, seafood or eggs — and before touching anything else at all.
- After touching a phone, a till, money, a door handle, a bin lid or your own face.
- After eating, drinking, smoking or coughing.
- Between tasks that are far apart on the risk ladder, which mostly means every time you move station.
And there is a physical precondition that decides all of it: a hand sink that is reachable without walking, with soap and a way to dry hands, kept clear. A hand sink with a tray of prep balanced in it is a hand sink that has been abolished, and hands will get rinsed at the pot sink instead, or not at all.
🧤 Gloves are not a shortcut
Gloves protect food from hands. They do nothing whatsoever to protect food from the last thing the glove touched, which is the misunderstanding that makes them actively dangerous.
A gloved hand that handles raw chicken, then opens the fridge, then plates a salad has moved everything it picked up onto that salad — and it has done it while looking careful. Bare hands would have been washed somewhere in that sequence, precisely because they feel dirty. Gloves feel clean, and that feeling is the hazard.
So: gloves change exactly when bare hands would have been washed, they go on after washing rather than instead of it, and they come off for anything that is not food handling. Torn gloves come off immediately, and a glove that has been on for two hours is doing nothing useful.
🤒 Who should not be here today
This is the rule with the largest effect and the lowest compliance in the whole course, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Somebody with vomiting, diarrhoea, jaundice, a sore throat with fever, or an uncovered infected cut on their hands should not be handling food. That part is not controversial and every food code says a version of it.
What decides whether it happens is arithmetic that has nothing to do with hygiene: if staying home costs a day's pay, people come in. They come in and they do not mention it, which is worse than coming in and saying so, because then you cannot even move them off food.
Three things make the rule real, and only the first is about food safety at all:
- Know what your own arrangement is for somebody who reports illness, and say it out loud before anybody needs it. Whatever the answer is, people work with the answer they assume, and the assumed one is always the worst one.
- Have somewhere to put them that is not the door. Front of house, prep that does not involve ready-to-eat food, cleaning. Being sent home is a punishment; being moved is not.
- Cover cuts properly — a waterproof dressing, brightly coloured so it is findable if it comes off, and a glove over it. This one is genuinely just technique.
👕 Uniform, hair and the training record
The rest is short. Clean clothes that are changed at work rather than worn in, hair tied back and covered, no jewellery on hands or wrists beyond a plain band, nails short and unvarnished, and nothing carried in an apron pocket that you would not want in the food.
None of this is difficult and all of it drifts, which is why it belongs in a training record rather than a conversation. Below is the log for that — what was covered, when, by whom and who was there. It is also the one piece of paper in this course that somebody outside your restaurant is most likely to ask to see.
| Date | Training topic | Trainer | Attendees |
Log the small sessions too. A five-minute briefing at the start of a shift about one specific thing, written down, is worth more than an annual training day nobody can date.