Elaine: Quality Assurance Manager and Food Safety Superhero

Elaine is a Quality Assurance Manager at the head office of a large chain of Canadian restaurants, and her days are devoted to fact-checking data, collating data, and feeding all of that information into various reports. Despite how boring that sounds, Elaine loves her job because she knows she plays a key role in helping her franchise owners and everyone else in the business be the best they can be.  

However, keeping an accurate record of food handler certifications has always been a bit problematic for Elaine. The usual way to get the data she needs is to get a picture of each individual employee’s food handler certification from each individual restaurant manager. She then stores that information in a centralized database (let’s face it, it’s usually a spreadsheet which contains a link to the picture). While the expiration dates of the certificates are usually logged, she doesn’t have a system where she’s notified of upcoming expirations, and can’t get an “at a glance” vision of who has a food handler certificate and who does not.  

Elaine is a master of information and may have built in macros, custom fields in a CRM, or other means to ping her when upcoming expirations are happening, or if a new employee doesn’t have their certificate after a certain period of time. But as everyone who has tried to customize their own information flow knows, these systems can easily fail.  

Spreadsheets no help when it comes to quarterly reporting  

Elaine handles a massive quantity of reports, but the reports her performance are probably scored most highly on - and her bonuses tied to - are her quarterly reports. Every time they come around, she can easily pull in other kinds of data, but who has and who doesn’t have a food handler certification for thousands of employees is not one of them. After the third quarterly report where she doesn’t hit 100% on her numbers because of missing food handler certifications, Elaine resolves to do something about it.  

Where to start? Corporate training for food safety is hard to find 

When Elaine starts her journey, she can easily find companies that do food handler certification in Canada. However, she can’t seem to find one that speaks directly to corporate or multi-location needs for corporate food handler training. She reaches out to her colleagues at other chains, and they tell her about FoodSafetyMarket.  

FoodSafetyMarket to the rescue!  

FoodSafetyMarket has a Learning Management System that Elaine’s company can either integrate into their own LMS or they can have their own solution at the easy address of (businessnamehere).lms.foodsafetymarket.com. Training can all be offered through the portal.  

Franchise owners can see what is happening at their franchise level, shift managers can see certifications of their team when planning staffing so that they know so many certified food handlers are on shift, and best of all - Elaine gets full visibility into all of these. If she wants to see expiring certifications organization-wide, she can. If she wants to see if key employees are missing food handler certifications, or if they’ve expired, she can.  

FoodSafetyMarket, in short, can get Elaine to a place where she can be in 100% compliance with everything in her reports - including food handler certification. Elaine turns in her first 100% compliant report and - in the process - has also been part of the important effort of managing the massive risk of not having food safety be in compliance for her company.  

This is based on a true story  

One of our clients actually had this experience - food handler certifications were the only thing stopping her from getting full compliance in her reporting for all of the reasons that we laid out here. If you are in quality assurance and need the same thing - or just want to be your company’s food safety superhero - get in touch with us today about our enterprise solutions for multi-location businesses and large franchises.