Tag Archives: critical violations

Bakery owner: It’s easy to follow the rules; good food safety is about staff who care

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Employing good food safety at retail is a combination of folks identifying risks and putting in mitigation steps to address them. The rub is that you need to cultivate a good staff who values the stuff that keeps patrons from getting sick. The science and guidance is relatively easy compared to the people stuff.

Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections, a pastry and bakery shop in Topeka, KS sorta has the people stuff figured out, according to cjonline.com.bakery-www

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” said co-owner Mark Murnahan, “I’m going to see it if it’s dirty.”

Murnahan said he has pretty high standards for his kitchen staff of four and constantly monitors everything to make sure they are in compliance. The KDA food guidelines, he said, are never farther than his laptop.

“I don’t want to serve anything I wouldn’t serve to my 98-year-old grandma or my 1-year-old son or anyone in between,” he said.

To accomplish that, Murnahan said, “training is critical” — and so is having a staff that cares about what it is serving.

“You have to know someone will take direction and have pride in what they serve,” he said. “Anyone who really wants to learn, the first thing they need to learn is food safety.”

“Anybody can have a good inspection,” Murnahan said. “It’s not hard to follow the rules. There are a lot, but once you know them, they’re really not hard to follow.”

‘Great pride’ Pittsburgh Airport restaurants short on food safety

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A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review of inspection reports for 19 restaurants at the Pittsburgh International Airport found that together they racked up some 270 critical violations over the past two years. Critical violations are the most serious types of problems that put people at risk for foodborne illnesses. The restaurants also accumulated roughly 230 lesser infractions.

Patricia Sabatini of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes the reports by the Allegheny County Health Department also showed seven “administrative” actions, a fairly rare occurrence in which persistent problems trigger a visit Pittsburgh International Airport.foodfrom a health department supervisor to press the need for corrective action.

“It sounds like more violations than we want to have,” interim health department director Ronald Voorhees said when asked about the newspaper’s findings.

The Airport Group, a policy group affiliated with the labor union Unite Here, last month expressed concerns about food safety conditions at the airport during a board meeting for the Allegheny County Airport Authority. (Unite Here does not represent workers at food concessions at the Pittsburgh airport.)

The group presented board members with an analysis identifying 271 violations at airport restaurants since the beginning of 2012, a shorter period of time than the newspaper’s review, including 132 critical violations.

By comparison, inspection reports for the similarly sized Mineta San Jose International Airport showed 146 violations at a nearly identical number of facilities over roughly the same time frame, with just two violations termed “major” by inspectors there, Airport Group analyst Ian Mikusko said.

“We wanted to alert the Allegheny County Airport Authority about the number of violations so it could take positive action to ensure the safety of food available to the airport’s passengers,” Mr. Mikusko said.

When asked about the newspaper’s findings and the concerns of the Airport Group, the airport authority issued an email statement saying it was “proud of the track record of Airmall’s food and beverage operators and of the hardworking food service workers who make the program a success.”

Airmall USA, which manages the retail space at the airport, also released a statement via email saying it “takes great pride in managing and maintaining a clean, safe food and beverage operation.”

Both the airport authority and Airmall emphasized that “no airport eatery has any outstanding issues” with the health department.

Inspection reports for Allegheny County restaurants are available online at http://webapps.achd.net/Restaurant. After locating a particular restaurant, click on the restaurant’s name to see inspection reports going back two years.