Cases of food contamination that have led to deaths and hospitalisation of Kenyans have been on the rise casting doubts on just how safe the food we eat is handled. Drawing form a case scenario covered by local press in June 2017, 10 people among some 500 delegates attending a medical conference were hospitalised following suspected cholera outbreak at Weston Hotel in Nairobi.
It was later discovered that the cause was food poisoning. Unlike in the past when stale food would be associated with dingy downtown backstreet restaurants, today there is a tight scrutiny even among the high-end hotels over their food handling and safety procedures. Doing a quick search with the words ‘stale food’ on TripAdvisor.com, thousands of reviews on hotels that served bad or stale food around the world pop up. These reviews may not be verifiable immediately, but they speak volumes about the quality standards food safety customers expect.
I consider myself a picky eater and tend to notice if food doesn’t taste right. My knee jerk reaction usually is to pay and never return as opposed to raising an alarm. Anecdotally, while dining at a Nairobi restaurant a few months back, I found a little metal splinter in my mocha frappe, not though until I was almost finished! I showed it to my waiter, and she simply exhaled, “Oh dear!”
The restaurant zero-billed me for the frappe but this left me with questions on just how airtight their food handling procedures are. At the end of the day, we deserve to eat freshly prepared and healthy food that tastes excellent.
Hotel or restaurant food almost always tastes better when it is fresh, piping hot, and served seconds after being cooked. However, due to irresponsible handling of food in various hotels, at times we end up eating stuff that is starting to go bad. The people serving probably think that it’s okay as long as it smells fine and doesn’t have any immediate effect on people. But there is more to stale food than just the weird smell, taste and texture, which may cause real harm to human life.
Why hotels should take food quality seriously
Food quality has a remarkable influence on a hotel/restaurant’s profitability brought about by high customer satisfaction, high referral rate and customer value. Thus, there is need for hotels and chain restaurants to re-evaluate their food examination process and focus more on research and prevention of different food hazards. This could mean developing internal capacity for quality assurance in food handling and assessment or contracting of an external independent food risk assurance service.
Hotels understand better the costs of foodborne illnesses especially to their brand. One bad occurrence can rip through your clients and your reputation forcing you to bare costs including for medical treatment, productivity loss and loss of business, pain and suffering of affected individuals among others.
Research on food safety in 4- and 5-star hotels in Egypt published in the Minia University’s Minia Journal of Tourism and Hospitality in December, 2016 espouses some of the leading foodborne risk factors that hotel management should look out for: Inadequate heat treatment, inappropriate storage, cross contamination and infected food handlers were the leading causes of general outbreaks. Others included improper food holding, poor personal hygiene, contaminated equipment, and inadequate cooking.
One of the key requirements for preparing and storing safe food is to have procedures based on the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) system and the ISO 22000 standard (Food Safety Management System), that provide hotels/restaurants with a systematic approach in identifying, evaluating, and controlling food safety hazards.
Globally, these procedures are recommended for the retail and hospitality sectors to take account of the increased complexity of food preparation in hotels. Food handlers should divide the safety procedures into broad categories based on the stages in the preparation of food, analyse the hazards and institute control measures at each stage. Therefore, good overall levels of knowledge of food safety among food handlers and the effective use of said knowledge are essential in ensuring consistency in food handling practices across hotel chains and production of safe food in hotel operations.
Healthy eating concept
High food quality, food safety and food handling procedures directly translates to healthy eating. The healthy eating concept has morphed from merely eating food that enables you to stay in good health, feel good, and have energy to being determined by customers’ lifestyle trends, focus on organic food, low-fat and non-genetically modified ingredient, saturated fat levels, polyunsaturated fat components, fibre and sodium levels in food and other categories that customers presume healthy.
Minor mishaps like over/under-salting, over/under-seasoning, or using unhealthy oils that cause gastrointestinal disturbances will turn away your customers. Thus, hotels should base their healthy eating products on customers’ ideas of what they deem healthy; for instance, whether to use sea salt or iodized salt, gluten free flour et cetera.
This calls for personalisation in food preparation, customising each plate you are serving out to individual customer’s preferences. Studies show that customers who seek long-term services from restaurants consider provision of healthy eating products as a motivation for dinning out.
Eventually, one of the trends that will shake up and shape the hospitality industry soon is if hotels will include healthy eating options in their portfolio of food. They could range from disease preventive products, products that help manage illnesses, products with low fat, salt, sugar & calories, organic products and indigenous products among others.
