Five Helpful Ways To Keep Your Restaurant Safe From The Swine Flu Virus

Mexico is a bad place right now for restaurant operators. In Mexico, not only are you more likely to get infected there, but most people would rather stay inside than leave the house and eat pork at some restaurant. The situation’s bad, and we can only hope for better news in the coming weeks.

As restaurant operators we need to make sure our staffs and customers are well-aware and protected from this possible swine flu pandemic, what they now call H1N1 influenza A. Here are some foodservice safety precautions issued by the National Restaurant Association.

• Remind employees of the possible pandemic
• Partner with the local health department
• Observe the basics of proper hygiene
• Inform your employees about the symptoms
• Be open to consultations

Remind employees of the possible pandemic
Remind your employees from time to time that knowing is half the battle. Make sure they understand that their safety and health—and that of your customers, too—are your top priorities. If your employees are made aware that you value their safety more than anything, they’ll be less likely to do things that’ll compromise their health and ability to work.

Partner with the local health department
Coordinate with the local health department regarding any precautions that might help restrict the spread of the virus in your local community. Keep in close contact with them, and make sure they give you a call whenever something, anything, new comes up. It’s always good to know that a restaurant I like is close friends with the local health department.

Observe the basics of proper hygiene
Don’t forget to observe basic hygiene procedures. Always wash your hands, cover the nose and mouth when you sneeze, and avoid touching your nose, mouth or eyes. It doesn’t hurt to post this as a bulletin for your customers near the dining area.

Inform your employees about the symptoms
Order a general meeting and discuss the symptoms with your employees. They are body aches, fatigue, sore throat, chills, cough, headaches, fever, and vomiting, even diarrhea. Ask them to see a doctor as soon as they start feeling any of these symptoms and, if the doctor recommends it, don’t show up for work.

Be open to consultations
Encourage your employees to come and talk to you about anything that concerns the swine flu. You’re here to help, not to lecture. Also print a copy of the symptoms and make sure it is posted in the work area and visible to employees at all times.

The NRA promised to post updates as soon as new information—and hopefully, vaccines—are discovered. Only time will tell what this new virus has in store for restaurant operators. In the meantime, let’s do our best to keep our restaurants a clean and safe place to eat.

More Ways For Your Restaurant Business To Stay On Top During A Recession

This is the second part of the article Discover Ways To Turn Your restaurant business Around During A Recession.

Karen Malody says about implementing change in restaurant operations to fight off economic change,

“It may feel like a time to reduce costs via an assortment of low-road solution paths: haphazardly laying off servers, buying cheaper ingredients or simply changing hours of operation without analysis… But cutting costs is not the same as increasing efficiency. Both affect the customer, but only one optimizes success. Many solutions are counter-intuitive.”

Here are some more tips from the expert.

1. Train staff how to use equipment
How your employees go about doing their work has a huge impact on the profits and losses of your business. This might sound elementary, as Sherlock Holmes would’ve put it, but since Karen had to mention it means there are more restaurant entrepreneurs who ignore it than acknowledge it. “Restaurant supply costs also have gone up faster than operators can raise prices,” another expert says on the subject.

Solution: How many times have you invited the repairman to the kitchen over the last couple months? Train the staffs to understand supplies – what each piece of equipment does, how to maintain it, how to use it, when to replace it and, sometimes even more importantly, what not to do with it.

2. Reopen your restaurant
Trio’s is an upscale restaurant in Ridgeland, Mississippi. It used to be good business. But recently no one was coming in as people thought the menu prices were too high at a time when things couldn’t get any worse. The owners, Pete and Steve Efstratiou were forced to shut it down a few weeks in an attempt to revamp its image to try and bring in more customers.

Solution: When I said reopen your restaurant, it meant redesigning the interiors, changing the restaurant’s name, and putting in more affordable meals on the menu and taking out the expensive ones. We’re in a recession, remember? For the Efstratiou brothers, the plan worked. An $18.95 seafood dish at the old Trio’s is now $14 on the new menu.

“We’ve had to adjust our speed from tables sitting for an hour or two to tables turning every 30-to-45 minutes,” says Steve Efstratiou.

3. Show them who’s boss
In the United States, the National Restaurant Association estimates that restaurants lose $2 billion to employee theft every year. If you don’t stop it from taking place in your restaurant, the recession is going to be the least of your problems when kitchen supplies go missing right when you need them.

Solution: Establish a zero-tolerance policy and hammer it down your employees’ throats from the very first day. You don’t have to be a <insert expletive here> to them, but be sure to make it clear that if they do it once, they’re gone.

Staying on top during a recession is more than just about laying off a couple of employees and cutting back on the rest. It requires some very intelligent decision-making on your part as restaurant owner.

John Foster Dulles said,

“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.”

It makes sense, more than anything, to the restaurant entrepreneur. Make a mistake and you pay for it once. Make the same mistake again and you pay for it twice.