Retail Food Safety Program Launched

WASHINGTON -- A food safety program for retailers was announced yesterday at the three-day Food Safety Summit Meeting in Washington.

Richard Linton, Purdue food science professor, and David McSwane, Indiana University associate professor of public and environmental affairs, along with independent writer Nancy Rue, collaborated to write a textbook and training program for managers and workers in convenience stores, supermarkets and any retail store that sells food to consumers.

Those who wrote the textbook and designed the program used the Food and Drug Administration Model Food Code as a basis for the main text in "SuperSafeMark Retail Best Practices and Guide to Food Safety and Sanitation."

"This training program for the retail food store industry is important because many states require that at least one person from each food establishment must pass a nationally recognized food safety certification exam," Linton said. "This is a major step in having uniform training to ensure food safety."

They also worked with the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and many of its members in the retail food industry to ensure that the training program was appropriate for the intended audience of retail food store managers and food handlers.

Joe Lackey, president of the Indiana Grocery and Convenience Store Association, said that this training program is essential to protect people from foodborne illness and to help standardize the way food is handled in stores all over the country.

"This program allows us to have a standard-gauge track to run on nationwide," said Lackey, whose organization is the state branch of FMI. "This will enable our trainers and managers to be more mobile, to move from state to state and use the same training in food handling."

Most outbreaks of food-borne illness occur in facilities that prepare, serve and sell food to the public, including retail food stores. The 433-page textbook contains numerous cartoon-like illustrations and photographs to aid in explaining the dangers of food contamination and the steps needed to avoid it. "We wanted the book to be easy to follow - entertaining as well as educational," Linton said.

The training program also includes a supervisor's guide for department-level managers, a quick reference guide for food handlers, a trainer's kit to aid in effectively teaching the program, and CD-ROMs containing PowerPoint slides and posters that can be customized. The materials also are available in Spanish.

"This kind of training is important, even for the people who are unloading trucks on the store dock," Lackey said. "They need to know things, such as you can't leave a crate of eggs sitting out on the dock because it can become contaminated."