Food Safety: Train the Trainers

At The Melting Pot, food safety depends on servers educating their customers.

By Mary Boltz Chapman, Editor-in-Chief -- Chain Leader, 3/1/2006

The Melting Pot has a unique food-safety challenge: It serves raw food to its guests. The Tampa, Fla.-based chain of 100 fondue restaurants confronts that challenge with its servers, its first line of defense.

Waiters and waitresses coach customers about how long to cook the meats and vegetables in hot pots of oil or broth. They check in often over the two- or even three-hour meal, to make sure guests know the importance of not touching their plate with raw chicken, for example, and cooking their beef for at least 90 seconds.

“Our system is very unique in that our guest is dealing with uncooked product. So we certainly have to include a lot of those types of warnings within the conversation between the staff and the guest,” explains Vice President of Franchise Operations Dick Sveum.

Culture Club
That requires a strong culture and a lot of training. “We hold certain principles very dear. One of those is to train our staff to feel that they are part of our system, understand our system, that they have a big role to play in our system,” he says. “We are a celebration destination. People come to us for a dining experience as opposed to just a meal. If we’re to have success at that, then our staff has to be primed and ready to be part of that celebration and really add to that experience instead of just serve food. That starts with a good, strong culture.”

Front-of-the-house staff must pass extensive training with high marks, and much of that centers around food safety. At daily preshift meetings, education on how to help the customer prepare their food properly is a regular topic.

To ensure that servers are up to speed, The Melting Pot uses a third-party mystery-dining service. Employees who are not executing properly must return to training and have to pass before they’re allowed back on the floor.

The company’s Training Champion program, launched in 2003, assigns one or two people in each unit to make sure the training standards are in place and are being upheld. The representatives receive special training and certification, and gather for an annual meeting and regional “training circles.”

The back-of-the-house employees also receive stringent training. Workers follow HACCP procedures, using color-coded cutting boards and taking and recording temperatures frequently.

Franchise Management
Franchisees, who operate 95 percent of the chain’s units, are also in the loop. A team of franchise business consultants visits units regularly, evaluating and assisting franchise owners. “Some of the evaluations we do are centered on quality of product coming in the back door, making sure that it meets the freshness standards that we’ve set. And that it’s handled properly from the time it’s received at the proper temperatures, and how it’s handled...all the way through to the front of the house to the guest.”

Franchisees also gather for regional meetings and an annual conference, where food safety is always on the agenda.

Sveum says The Melting Pot has been lucky when it comes to food-safety problems. “But that luck stems from continual training, being very focused and concerned about food safety both in front of the house and the back of the house,” he adds.

The company’s next food-safety challenge is finding an executive to control it. “We recently lost the person in charge of food safety and quality,” Sveum says. “We’re recruiting for that position right now, looking for someone who’s got a very strong background in operations. That’s a person who is going to spend a lot of time in the restaurants challenging our procedures and policies that we’ve got in place right now, and really researching them and researching the industry to be certain we are doing it the best that we can.”