Preserving Your Restaurant Chains’ Reputation

2. Build dynamic forms. Questions on your food safety audit form must provide sufficient information to drive change and spur corrective action. If your form is nothing but a giant yes/no checklist, get rid of it. It’ll do you no good. The following are examples of questions that will not provide sufficient information.

• Is food stored in the refrigerator at the proper temperature?
• Are the bathrooms cleaned on a regular basis?
• Were customers greeted immediately upon arriving?

Yes, these may seem like logical questions, but all they’re doing is scratching the surface. This is what’s known as a “flat form” and will leave your operations people wondering, “Now what?” Instead, your audit form must be a “dynamic form” that also features relevant follow-up questions that provide essential, additional details. The best dynamic forms will be offered via cloud-based, mobile software—not via an electronic spreadsheet, and certainly not with a paper and pencil system.

For example, what if a trend emerges indicating a portion of the food is the wrong temperature? You need to be able to identify the root cause of this issue. Additional data should identify exactly which food is out of temperature, where this food is located, and the temperature of the food.

A dynamic form will offer about 20 different question types, allowing companies to customize the specific information their questions capture. The “question tree” is one of the most popular question types. Here’s how it might work with the following question: Is food out of temperature? If this produces a “no” answer, then the dynamic form automatically continues to the next question, bypassing any irrelevant follow-up questions. This timesaving feature creates a far more efficient audit. But if the answer is “yes,” then a series of relevant questions automatically appear on the auditor’s mobile device, such as: Which food is out of temperature? What temperature is it? Where in the restaurant is it located?

With this information, those responsible for executing any corrective action can see, for example, the potato salad in the walk-in cooler was 6 degrees too warm. Now the company can take corrective action by developing training for that restaurant on how to better maintain its walk-in cooler and how to prepare the potato salad to prevent it from not being maintained at the proper temperature.

3. Make correct answers consistent. As much as possible, make sure your correct answer choices are consistent throughout the audit form. In other words, a “yes” answer should indicate compliance and a “no” answer the opposite. Take the following questions for example.

• Are the bathrooms clean? Yes – correct, No – incorrect
• Is the ice machine clean? Yes – correct, No – incorrect
• Are there any pests in the facility? Yes – incorrect, No – correct

The last question should be changed to “Is the facility free of pests?” This will prevent confusion and create consistency. (Of course, as discussed in the previous point, your form should be dynamic and have follow-up questions to these yes/no questions!)

4. Have a logical scoring system. Well-formatted questions won’t produce a fair assessment of the restaurant without a logical scoring system. Both are essential.

Critical violations must be clearly distinguished from non-critical violations on food safety audit forms. Make sure your scoring system for these two types of violations is logical. Think of it this way: Use points to make a “point.” If a particular question is critical to your restaurant’s operations, then assign it a high-point value. The auditor should know to give all points for compliance and zero points for failing to meet standards. Subjectivity from the scoring is eliminated.

Lastly, the established scoring system must be readily available on the food safety audit form. Auditors should be able to easily understand the scoring system so that there’s consistency in scoring from auditor to auditor.