A New Westminster company is training food and beverage staff how to keep customers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CovidSafe is a course businesses can have their staff take to be better prepared for the pandemic at a time when many are reopening, said Keith Herle, a former public health inspector.
Herle and his wife Sandra have a business that teaches food safety – employing 25 part-time instructors and teaching more than 100,000 students - but that was “stopped in its tracks by COVID-19 when safe in-person classes became impossible,” said Keith, who also teaches health and environmental safety at BCIT.
So, the New West couple had to pivot.
“Like everyone, we felt terrible for the decimated food and beverage industry, which we worked very closely with,” said Keith.“Like everyone, we also longed to be able to dine out without worry. We realized that when the public was allowed to visit restaurants and bars, two issues needed to be addressed.”
These two areas are:
- Staff training: do food and beverage staff know how to keep the public safe from COVID-19 when dining out?
- Public confidence: will the public be confident enough in their safety to dine out?
“Information was available from credible agencies, but there was no way of ensuring that information was being received, read or absorbed by food and beverage staff,” Keith said.
Another worrying point is that misinformation is rampantabout what is needed to control COVID-19, and food and beverage workers are not immune to that misinformation, Keith said.
So, Keith and Sandra have spearheaded the creation of CovidSafe, a two-hour online course designed to ensure food and beverage service staff learn what they need to know tokeep people safein this new age of COVID-19. Quizzes and a final exam must be passed to achieve certification
To help increase public confidence, a “CovidSafe” door or window decal and certificate are issued for display upon successful completion of the course.
CovidSafe teaches food and beverage staff about how to do everything they do in their work, but in a way that will avoid potential transmission of COVID-19. “That includes everything from receiving their foods, storage, cooking, serving, sanitizing surfaces,” Keith said. “There are many things that these staff members must do to ensure the virus is not potentially reaching customers via their food, dishes, things they may touch, etc. Some specific examples of things I touch on are dishes not being sanitized by a dishwasher -sanitizer bucket is empty or the dishwasher fails for several reasons, easy solutions to which are provided in the course - or the disinfecting cloth being used to wipe things down having no active disinfectant left in it because it has reacted with the cloth or food debris.”
For more information, call 604-565-3663 or email info@advance-education.com.
