Food Safety: Top to Bottom

Piccadilly Cafeterias is certifying all its managers in food safety. Next up: assistant managers and corporate executives.

By Christine Zimmerman, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 6/1/2003

Jeff Portwood, director of training and development, was charged with upgrading the food safety program when he came to Piccadilly last year.

When your unit managers have been with your company for an average of 17 years, how do you change old habits? The answer is clear, according to Piccadilly Cafeterias, which is in the process of certifying all of its managers in food-safety practices. You stay on the case nonstop and make the rules part of your culture. All 600 managers in the organization, including many who don’t handle food, such as human resources, are being certified in ServSafe, a program administered by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF). Even top management is going through training to make sure the message gets out systemwide that food safety is a top priority.

Baton Rouge, La.-based Piccadilly has always placed a strong emphasis on food safety. In fact, the corporation has had its own in-house quality-assurance program in place since 1981. The chain has worked closely with the Louisiana Restaurant Association and has been in the forefront of developing HACCP principles, says Jeff Portwood, Piccadilly’s director of training and development.

Ratchet It Up
Last year, the company decided it was ready to take food safety to a new level by developing consistent and, more importantly, measurable standards for its 207 locations. “We got in touch with the NRAEF and set a goal of having all managers ServSafe certified or recertified within the year. We are halfway there,” says Portwood.

Widely recognized by federal, state and local health jurisdictions, ServSafe has trained over 1.5 million foodservice professionals, according to NRAEF.

“The benefit of ServSafe is that it is a way of measuring competency,” says John Poulos, vice president of sales for the NRAEF. “You can go back and determine where you have deficiencies and further train staff.”

Poulos says Piccadilly has shown its commitment to the program by taking its managers to the highest level of competency and having them share that knowledge back at the units. He notes that organizations can spend as much as $400 to $600 to train each manager, including training materials and traveling expenses.

NRAEF helped Piccadilly set benchmarks, develop a budget and formulate its overall strategy. “I had to get on the phone with them because this was a big task,” says Portwood.

Jumping Hurdles
One of the main challenges facing Piccadilly is the size of its menu. “We do so much from-scratch cooking. We offer 150 to 200 new items a day, and each day is completely different,” says Chris Sanchez, executive vice president and director of operations services at Piccadilly. “We have 1,300 recipes managers can work with. The margin for error in terms of safety can increase,” he explains.

“The cafeteria environment can be quite complex,” adds Portwood. “That’s why it is so important that food safety is kept a top-of-mind issue.”

Another challenge was changing employees’ attitudes. “We are a 60-year-old company,” Portwood says. “We have decades of habitual experience.” He explains that it is impossible to go out with a heavy hand and tell managers to change their preparation methods. “They might say, ‘Well, I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years,’” he says. The tenure of the average Piccadilly team manager is 35 years. “To change attitudes, you have to constantly be on top of things.”

Adding incentive helps, too. Piccadilly has created a database of certified managers and will make exam scores part of their performance appraisals. Sanchez says general managers have an average score of 88.9, while regional managers average 96.1 percent on the exam.

Managing the resources of time, manpower and money has been Piccadilly’s final challenge. “We’ve budgeted enough to get us trained down through the general-manager ranks,” says Portwood. The budget is $30,000. To date, 234 managers have been trained in 45 days, at a cost of about $100 per head. ServSafe materials cost about $75, and the remaining cost is travel.

Out of the Blocks
Piccadilly started with a six-member team from human resources. They were certified and trained to be instructors. “Here we have these people being trained to become food-safety experts when that normally is not part of their responsibilities,” says Portwood.

“We created our own sense of urgency,” he says. “I’ve seen other organizations do ServSafe internally, but not as fast as we have. We’ve given ourselves one fiscal year.” The course itself takes a full day, which includes a workshop followed by an exam.

Portwood sent ServSafe materials to participants four to six weeks before the course, along with a study guide that was developed in-house. The guide helped managers track their progress on a weekly basis. “We wondered, do we want to send this book out and hope they open it, or break it down for them,” says Portwood, who notes that the materials look daunting. “It could give you flashbacks to high school or college days.”

In some areas, managers from different units got together in study groups.

The Follow-Up
Getting managers certified is only part of the plan. Implementing any successful program means keeping track of its progress. To keep food safety top of mind, Piccadilly holds risk-management meetings in all locations every month. Every unit also has a communications board featuring updated information on topics such as personal hygiene, food safety terminology and proper storage. Regional managers also do regular unit walk-throughs armed with food safety checklists.

One outcome of the staff’s education has been a run on purchasing requests. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from the units requesting funds for fixing equipment so it’s up to spec,” says Portwood.

Through August and September, Piccadilly will send its 375 associate and assistant managers for ServSafe certification. After that, managers will train their hourly workers.

Finally, Portwood will be charged with training Piccadilly’s president, COO and CEO. “They want to be role models, even though they may never need to oversee any food-safety issues,” says Portwood. The recertification process for the whole group will take place next year.

To Market or Not To Market
One question Piccadilly is not quite clear on just yet is whether to market its food-safety initiatives to customers. “I guess right now there is no proof that it would create an advantage for us. Food safety may be more of a feel-good thing. I don’t know if it would increase sales,” Portwood notes.

The key for Piccadilly is that all its hard work will put it ahead of the curve in terms of meeting increasingly stringent food-safety standards. Says Portwood, “We want to lead the industry.”