1st Reporting
Inspections can happen at any time. Using a Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist is the answer. In most states and provinces, reviews can happen randomly or if a disgruntled person calls in a complaint or on a schedule that only the inspector may know.
All sorts of situations could trigger an inspection, so ensuring you have a regular review in place is critical to maintaining compliance.
Foodservice businesses using a Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist in their day-to-day operations have a distinct advantage over companies that do not. Maintaining a minimum acceptable level of health standards by way of this practice is essential to meet and exceed compliance standards in your facility.
Your restaurant’s reputation and quality are essential. That’s why we have created the Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist that you can download on this page today. We’ll discuss the workings of the template and some best practices for use.
Following that, we’ll provide some great tips to help you keep your kitchen inspections lean and mean without sacrificing the audit quality, so stick around, and let’s get this cooking!
Included In The Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist
We created the Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist based on industry-standard inspection practices across various countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. However, this audit template should work in most countries that cherish health and safety in foodservice establishments.
The auditing template is comprised of eight sections. These sections include:
- Administrative
- Food Storage Practices
- Freezing and Refrigeration
- Food Preparation
- Sanitation Practices
- Garbage and Recycling Disposal
- Team member Hygiene
- Notes & Sign-Off
Administrative
Keeping track of food service audits is vital when you want to look at trends over time. Therefore a simple administrative section that includes vital information such as the location, names of inspector and restaurant manager, and the date are all present.
Food Storage Practices
Food storage is an integral aspect of maintaining clean conditions. We’ve included five essential questions to ask when doing a kitchen audit. Similarly, we’ve also included a notes section to the right where the inspector might note further observations and recommendations.
Freezing and Refrigeration
Essentially an aspect of food storage, we’ve separated the freezing and refrigeration portion of the audit. The section includes observation points relating to temperature observation and logging, equipment cleanliness, and even emergency exit fridge or freezer door functionality. Again, we’ve included a section to the right for further notes.
Food Prep
As you know, you must maintain the strictest cleanliness in the food prep area of any foodservice business. This section of the auditing template focuses on cross-contamination, thawing, and, naturally, the cleanliness practices involving the food prep areas.
Sanitation Practices
Most foodservice facilities, save for chip trucks and similar less-permanent establishments, require washrooms. Similarly, kitchen equipment sanitation is equally essential. This section of the Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist has a primary focus on the sanitation practices of the restaurant. Like all sections of the audit template (save for the beginning administrative and ending notes and sign-off), this section also has a notes area.
Garbage and Recycling Disposal
We felt it prudent to include a section relating to garbage and recycling disposal following the sanitation practices. Given that restaurants and food service establishments have a lot of organic waste, it is critical for management to maintain strict policies and practices relating to the disposal of refuse.
Critters such as mice, cockroaches, and other pests love organic waste, so it’s essential to include a robust set of procedures to help eliminate any possibility of rodent or insect pests. This section of the audit sheet covers these practices and contains a notes section for further observations.
Team Member (Employee) Hygiene
Our final stage of the restaurant audit checklist includes some observations regarding team member hygiene practices. Restaurants are notoriously scrutinized over hygiene practices, especially those involving food prep staff and hand washing. This section covers the basics regarding said health and safety procedures.
Notes & Sign-Off
Following any health and safety audit, including final notes and overall impressions, is essential. Although opinions are discouraged in most report writing, it is wise to give a general impression following an inspection. Similarly, there may be notes, or other observation items that were not included previously on the template that the inspector feels is pertinent information to include.
Finally, a sign-off by the inspector and date area is provided to finalize the report.
How To Use The Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist
Completing your restaurant health and safety audit couldn’t be easier than using our audit template. All you need to do is:
- Download the free Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist template.
- Print enough copies to satisfy your timeline for health inspections.
- Locate a safe place in the kitchen to store your completed audit paperwork.
- Perform a health inspection audit, following the sections provided on the template.
- Assess and correct any deficiencies noted during the inspection.
- Perform a follow-up audit and note the deficiencies as rectified.
- Store your audit documents for future trends review.
As you can see, the steps are fairly straightforward and easy to remember. However, some of these steps might become complicated, given an extraneous amount of time. For example, if your restaurant is open every day of the week, and you perform an audit every day on open or close, then you will have an awful lot of audit sheets to review to analyze trends. Not to worry, we’ve got a solution for that too.
8 Tips To A More Streamlined Restaurant Inspection Process
In order to make restaurant health and safety inspections easier, restaurant managers need to be aware of the following eight tips. These are simple measures that will help them streamline their restaurant inspection process.
Always Stay Prepared For Surprise Audits
Staying ahead of the game is critical for your establishment. There are three great things you can do to ensure you’re ready in the case of a surprise audit:
1) Keep a checklist of your restaurant’s deficiencies with the date they were corrected – this way, you can quickly see what problems have been fixed in your establishment.
2) Make sure you have enough copies of your restaurant health inspection checklist template on hand – it is vital that all employees know how to complete one.
3) Complete an audit every day or at least once per week for each shift – this way, you’ll always be able to review trends and keep up with corrections.
Reward Team Member Buy-In Behavior
One of the essential aspects of a restaurant is its team members. Without them, the restaurant would not be able to function correctly. And one of the essential aspects of team members is their buy-in behavior. That is, their willingness to work together for the common goals of the restaurant. To foster this type of behavior, restaurant managers should implement a few key strategies.
First, managers should create and enforce clear standards for team member conduct. This case includes expectations for things such as dress code, cleanliness, and adherence to health and safety protocol. By setting these standards and ensuring that employees are aware of them, managers can help reduce confusion and encourage positive behaviors among team members.
Second, restaurant managers should provide regular feedback to team members. Those who receive positive and constructive feedback are more prone to feeling they are a part of a necessary process and are likely to increase their buy-in behavior.
Thirdly, rewarding team members when they excel at protocol compliance is the best way to get staff to play by the rules. And this way, they might even develop a friendly bit of competition to see which team member may receive the most praise or reward for their buy-in.
Strive To Comply Plus More
The best way to maintain an effective and compliant food service establishment is by adopting a more stringent policy than the minimum safety requirements. We like to think of it as going the extra mile for health and safety.
You might wonder how doing extra improves overall efficiency. Well, when we establish that fines or facility shutdowns cost a lot of time and money, then doing that little extra to ensure compliance doesn’t seem like much extra at all. Think of it as a bit of extra that can prevent a lot.
Maintain A Clean And Organized Work Space
Clean and organized work environments are the name of the game here. When managing a restaurant, the last thing you want during a rush is to wonder where you’re going to find something. Similarly, you don’t want to have to try to do a deep cleaning in the middle of a dinner rush. That’s why maintaining organizational cleanliness is so critical to the efficiency of your operation.
Label Equipment & Supplies
A restaurant’s food safety is essential to a safe environment in your establishment. Labeling equipment and supplies is a way of maintaining that safety. Proper labeling systems and procedures are necessary for any climate where foodstuff contamination might occur. For example, you don’t want new staff thinking that stainless steel cleaner is safe to use on a wooden cutting board. However, without proper labels and procedures in place, these sorts of costly hazard-creating mistakes happen every day, sacrificing successful restaurants and making management cringe in terror.
Develop Standard Operating Procedures
Ensuring that your kitchen SOP (standard operating procedures) includes the minimum checkpoints for legal requirements and other aspects of H & S is a wise inclusion to your organizational standards and processes. Restaurants’ cleanliness depends on the safety and quality standards included in your procedures and is a part of the restaurant’s critical infrastructure.
Not sure what to include in your SOP? We’ve got an article about SOP writing that you might want to consider reading. Similarly, we have numerous templates to download to use the paper forms to record your inspection data. However, if you’re going to take advantage of powerful data analytics, you may consider a digital inspection app to use for your scheduled inspections. We’ll touch on that more later.
Audit Regularly To Identify Deficiencies
A thorough food inspection to adhere to acceptable conditions for your establishment is vital, as we have already discussed. However, ensuring cleanliness at restaurant opening is just one way to accelerate the restaurant’s potential. A successful restaurant adheres to strict schedules for creating its inspection reports.
You should include regular audits of the service quality and cleanliness of the restaurant in the team’s routine tasks. Similarly, reviewing these reports is equally essential for creating mitigation strategies.
Audits Build Customer Appreciation
Customers will appreciate the establishment striving for maximum potential regarding cleanliness – so regular audits and inspections are critical to restaurant cleanliness and its aesthetic condition. And they are the only way to identify the proper corrective actions to avoid time-consuming shutdowns or avoid fines.
Use An Auditing App That Includes The Restaurant Health Inspection Checklist
Do you want to save time and get the much-needed support you deserve? A restaurant inspection app is a digital tool you need to ensure cleanliness in a dynamic place. Your first audit on a new app will take a bit longer than usual as you get the hang of the platform. But the time you will save by completing an audit on a food inspection app will aid your establishment in better operations.
Using a restaurant inspection app for your reports is easy and helps by helping to interpret reports and trends effortlessly. That’s one of the superpowers of digital inspections. When you include a digital format for restaurants and food inspection, you use a tool with a means to take the collected data and provide automated reports. This trend analysis will give you insights into the effective standard operating procedures and safe practices that you need to implement. It’s a great way to stay efficient while effectively mitigating things like receiving a critical infraction that could stop business.
Why wait? Give the 1st Reporting app a try today in your restaurant and find out what digital reporting efficiency really is.
