Importance of Food Hygiene Training
Let’s start with a statistical fact. According to the UK Food Standards Agency, there are over 500,000 cases of food poisoning found per year, and all of these are caused by bacteria food contamination or poorly cooked food. Contaminated foods can raise serious health concerns with deadly consequences. So, the importance of food hygiene training can easily be understood.
The food business owners and the workers or employees who work with or around food are bound by the law to understand their food safety responsibilities. Food hygiene training can ensure that you and your team have the necessary skills and knowledge to maintain food safety.
Continue reading as I’m going to dig deeper on the importance of food hygiene training and the related aspects of it.
What is Food Hygiene & Safety?
Illness-causing bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemicals may cause food contamination. And, the food contamination may occur at any stage of its production, processing, distribution, storage and preparation.
Food safety is used as a scientific discipline that describes all the practices which are used to keep the food safe. The term labels the process of handling, preparing, and storing food in ways that prevent food-borne illness.
The Importance of Food Hygiene
Food hygiene and safety is essential in many ways. Following are some keynotes on the importance of food safety.
- Foods contaminated by bacteria, viruses and parasites can cause food poisoning. Food poisoning can create serious health hazards.
- Gastroenteritis and dehydration are often caused by food poisoning. Food poisoning may lead to more severe health problems like kidney failure.
- Contaminated food items may not look, taste or smell different than regular food items. Without proper knowledge of food safety you can’t spot the difference.
- Babies, children, older people and pregnant women are more vulnerable to food poisoning as they have a weaker immune system.
What is Food Hygiene Training?
Through good food hygiene practices, we can easily avoid foodborne illnesses that arise from eating contaminated food. Food handlers who have proper and adequate knowledge of food safety and hygiene can maintain this good practice.
A food hygiene training equips food handlers with the qualification that relates their knowledge to their work environment. The training is not only to teach food handlers or business owners about food safety but also to familiarise with the procedures to follow during a food hygiene inspection.
Why is Food Hygiene Training Important?
It is the requirement of the law that food businesses need to provide their workers with an adequate understanding of food safety. The training can minimise the risk of food contamination, and it can establish a suitable safety system in the kitchen or food-handling areas. Through good food hygiene training, a food handler is to get proper knowledge of food handling, storage, cooking temperature, and cleaning techniques.
Proper food hygiene practice ensures that customers don’t get affected by food poisoning and allergic reactions. Minimising food waste and boosting the efficiency of the food handlers are some of the fantastic benefits of food hygiene training.
Following are some more on the benefits of food hygiene training:
Preventing Cross-Contamination
Spillages and cross-contamination are two of the significant ways of spreading harmful bacteria within kitchen or food-handling areas. Even the smallest amount of cross-contamination can create a severe issue of allergic reaction and food poisoning.
Food hygiene training will familiarise learners with different types and scenarios of cross-contamination and teach them how to minimise the risk.
Reducing Food waste
Pests or vermin are attracted by food waste, and they can develop dangerous food poisoning bacteria. That’s why proper waste management come into work. It is also a prerequisite for the excellent food safety management system. Poor waste management can cause many food safety hazards. It may even grow natural toxins in food.
Training on food hygiene will equip the learners with the proper knowledge of food storage and organisation. They will learn how to ensure the quality of food and reduce food waste. An appropriate understanding of food waste management will save the business time and money.
Building a Well-designed kitchen
You might wonder – “why a well-designed kitchen is important to ensure food hygiene?” It is. This is the place where your hard work, strategy, passion, and creativity comes into operation to create a meal for your customer. In a well-designed kitchen, you can keep everything organised and clean which is the essential requirement of food hygiene and safety.
Proper training on food hygiene is to help to build a well-designed kitchen.
Improving the Efficiency of Food Handlers
It is no wonder that poor efficiency in any business is due to the lack of training. It is also true for food business. If your staffs are aware of their duties and responsibilities, the workflow will become better.
So, proper food hygiene training can help in this way to improve the efficiency of your workers or employees.
Creating a Positive Culture
Food hygiene training will make you familiar with the good practices of hygiene at your workplace. Once you’ve started to follow the rules of hygiene, it will reduce the risk of sickness and allergic reactions. Over time, this practice will become a workplace culture and motivate the employees to follow them.
Building a Positive Reputation of Business
In the food business, the trust of the consumers is the most important thing to make a good reputation. If your business upholds good hygiene practices, your customers are to recognise your effort and hard work to ensure food hygiene and safety.
Food hygiene training helps the staffs to learn the importance of positive reputation in a food business and how to earn it.
Conclusion
In today's world, food hygiene and safety is an international challenge that needs to be overcome. Food will never be risk-free, but the food industry needs to act to keep the risk at a minimum level. In addition, familiarise with food hygiene and know the process of maintaining food safety will lower the risk of foodborne hazards.
In this article, I have tried to present the importance of food hygiene training by familiarising you with different aspects of food hygiene and provide readers with the notion that why this buzzing term is so important for the food industry. There are many online training on this topic that can help you get a better understanding of food hygiene and safety.
Hope, you’ve enjoyed reading this. Eat safe and be healthy!
Ultimate Public speaking Guide that You Should Follow
Speaking before public is especial ability for the people. This is ugly true that everyone is not good there in public speaking. Let’s see how to prepare yourself for public speaking from the below:
Be prepared
The most important part of a successful presentation takes place even before you start speaking. Once you start speaking, you will be grateful for your challenging preparation and practice.
- Create your presentation with plenty of free time and take notes on every item you want to highlight for each slide. This time it helps you to make sure you have all the material you need and you can practice a lot.
- If you want to use a booklet, make sure you have it ready in advance (this is also a useful backup for technical problems).
- Give your presentation to the mirror, your partner / mother or roommate or video camera. Get comments and watch the recording. Determine where your difficulties are and what bad habits you might have. Correct it with more practice or change the conversation.
- If there are words that are difficult to pronounce, or technical terminology, make sure you can pronounce them. Proper pronunciation and knowledge of the language of the industry will give you credibility.
Control the space
Keep your body language in mind. Proper physical communication can have a profound impact on the reception and interpretation of your message.
Here are some ways to improve your body language:
- Look at your audience and keep your feet straight at the hips
- Make eye contact, but not for long! You do not want to look scary
- Do not stay rigid and do not hide behind a desk. Move freely, but not over. Have the available space on the stage
- Avoid crossing your arms, pressing your hands behind or in front of your body, or your hands in your pockets.
- Do not play with anything. Keep your hands free for expressive gestures.
Know your audience
Scientists often have to give presentations to different people like the public, students and other experts in their field. Make sure that content, language; sound and body language are suitable for the public.
Also try to understand why the audience listens. Ask: "What would listen to this talk do to me?" As if you were in the audience yourself. Make your purpose clear and what the audience should expect when you are there. In addition, establish your credibility. Tell your audience why he should listen to you.
Add a little style
If you use presentation slides, use them. The slides should be more than pretty, but a bit of fun and colour usually does not hurt. Here are three tips for improving slides:
- Keep the words on each slide to a minimum
- Make sure the words or pictures are big enough to be in the back of the room.
- Add only pictures, videos, and animations to make your points clearer. (Do not add if they have the opposite effect!
You do not want everything you say on the slides. Just ask for help to remember what to talk about and audio-visual media to improve your reasoning.
Do you accept the Challenge
Public speaking is part of a researcher's life and you must use every opportunity to defend your work. What good is it to make scientific discoveries (big or small) when nobody knows them?
The best way to deal with the (sometimes unfortunate) need to speak in public is to accept it, to understand how it will help you and your audience, and to benefit from the conversation that causes it.
Some Incredible Mental Health Tips for Better life
To stay fit and healthy, it is important to pay attention to one's mental health. You can do many things to stay in good mental health.
Sleep enough
Sleep is very important for our physical and mental health. Sleep helps to regulate the chemicals in our brain that transmit information. These chemicals are important for dealing with moods and emotions. If we do not sleep enough, we may feel depressed or anxious.
The Sleep Foundation gives tips on how to sleep well and overcome sleep disorders.
Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs
Alcohol consumption and smoking are not always associated with withdrawal symptoms but may affect your mental health. If you drink a few drinks, you may feel more depressed and anxious the next day, and it may be harder to concentrate. Excessive consumption of alcohol over a longer period may lead to thiamine deficiency.
Thiamine is important for the function of our brain and a deficiency can lead to serious memory problems, motor problems (coordination), confusion and visual disturbances. When you smoke, your body and brain retract between the cigarettes, making you irritable and anxious.
Other medications often leave you feeling abstinent and can cause a very low mood and anxiety. The most serious effects of medications include paranoia and delusions. Some research suggests that drug use is linked to the development of mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Manage stress
Stress is often unavoidable, but knowing your cause and knowing how to maintain good mental health is essential. Try to get to grips with your responsibilities and concerns by creating a list or schedule that shows when you can solve every problem. When you analyze and write down your worries and tensions, you often find that they are manageable. Try to avoid sticking your head in the sand and attacking the problems that occur. If you find that you have sleep problems or wake up and think about all the things that stress you, write them down and be reassured if you manage to get over them in the morning.
Do something you like
Try to take the time to do the fun things you love. If you enjoy walking, painting or watching a particular TV show, take some time for fun. If we do not spend time doing things we like, we can become irritable and unhappy.
Whether you need help getting out or not, read our Tasks section or our Events Calendar to get ideas and information about the events in your area.
Connect with others and be sociable.
Strive to cultivate good relationships and talk to people whenever you have the opportunity. Having friends is not only important for your self-esteem but also to support you when you are not feeling well. Research has shown that a ten-minute conversation with others can improve memory and test results.
If you have problems or do not want to go out to meet people, you can be inspired by our social activity pages or on the event calendar.
Final words
Mental satisfaction is very important for life and we have to be fine mentally for making something big. If we can follow the above tips, will help you to stay happy and cool all the time even under pressure.
How to Market Yourself as a Gas Engineer
Whether you have just completed training as a gas engineer or considering a career change, it can be daunting to know how you can succeed with enough success to make your new business work.
At Options Skills, we know how extensive this learning curve can be, and we've put together our best advice to maximize opportunities and grow your career.
Mouth to mouth
Building a network is one of the most important things you can do in the business, be it on a commercial website or to promote yourself positively. Never underestimate your skills and knowledge as a gas engineer.
Use review sites and local directories
By using sites like Trust a Trader, Check a Trade and your own network in Nice and on the ground, your customers are just a click away by reading reviews, finding your website and contacting them. When you are doing a job for a client, do not be afraid to encourage them to leave an opinion.
Customer service
The relationship you build with your customers is entirely up to you. As explained above, word of mouth is a very useful tool. People tend to trust the opinions of their friends, family members and colleagues.
Therefore, it is very important to be professional with your customers. It is very likely that a well-done job will lead to another, either with the same customer or as a reference.
The reputation you build can be one of your most important assets when you market your business. So make sure your customers have something positive to say about their experiences.
Brand, slogans and signs
Promote your business with memorable signs and slogans on your van that grab the attention of potential customers. This means that it can be marketed anywhere without saying a word. Publish flyers, hand out business cards and possibly give your customers a magnet or sticker. The recognizable brand is the key to being the first person to call when it needs a gas engineer.
Connect to local companies
Being autonomous does not require you to do it alone. Connect with companies like local estate agents and construction companies. Advertise in local magazines and free newspapers. By publishing your name and maintaining relationships, you can really improve your business.
What distinguishes you?
Find your unique selling proposition, your professional ethics and your business acumen can help you differentiate yourself. Do not be afraid to tell people about your accomplishments, your qualifications and the positive traits that a potential customer would expect from a trusted trader.
Set up a website
As a voluntary apprentice you are entitled to Nice and Local services. This includes a free professional website after completing your course as well as future business opportunities. If you have a working website, do not forget to collect the opinions and comments of your customers. People always read the comments, so make sure they're good. Keep your coverage up to date with your experiences and pictures of the latest work.
Use social networks
The future is here and more than that, it's free. Use social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to share your work and connect with your customers and businesses. Social networks are a fast and efficient way to stay in touch with customers and to inform them about offers or updates.
Become a businessman
You have completed your education and now what? So you're also an engineer, commercial director and marketing department. This involves identifying your market and developing strategies that determine the direction of your business.
Always act professionally. Respectfully dealing with customers contributes significantly to building a strong relationship and recommending them to repeat customers.
