Fast Food Leader Learns Lessons in Hygienic Design

AARON HAND | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

INSPIRE BRANDS is a young company, just five years old, but it’s made up of several mature restaurant chains—Arby’s, Baskin-Robbins, Bu alo Wild Wings, Dunkin’, Jimmy John’s, and Sonic Drive-In—that, together, make it the second largest restaurant company in the U.S. by sales. “Mature restaurant chains, young company—it’s definitely been a learning curve and a great opportunity for us to move forward,” says Chris Polito, director of food safety for Inspire.

It’s not been without its challenges, as Polito detailed for attendees of a food safety forum hosted by Commercial Food Sanitation (CFS) as part of the Intralox NEXT event in March in New Orleans. Inspire Brands has a shared service model today, but early on, its various brands were working in their own silos. As Inspire brought each of those brands together for joint e orts and learnings, it used both reactive and proactive lessons to move the organization forward as a whole.

“Designing for greatness [CFS’s theme for the forum] is best done proactively, right? But sometimes something rears its ugly head, and we have to learn the hard way,” Polito says. “The key is to embrace those learnings and really focus on building the walls taller and stronger. In other words, focusing on prevention for the future to try and mitigate those things from occurring again.”

Some of the stories that Polito shared dealt more with equipment used within the restaurants—flies getting into new drink machines with faulty seals, for example, which led to better testing of the equipment received. But he also zeroed in on problems that Inspire’s food suppliers were facing with their equipment, which led in turn to contamination of the food supply.

Metal in food

Inspire started getting complaints from guests at the restaurant level about metal appearing in product. When Inspire contacted its supplier, the supplier revealed that it did have an issue in which a piece of metal broke o a piece of equipment and was processed and packaged. This was caught by the metal detector, though, production was put on hold, and 100% of the metal was accounted for. And yet Inspire restaurants kept getting metal complaints.

“Upon our further investigation into this, we had metal-on-metal contact,” Polito explains. “What had happened is the equipment loosened over time, and no one noticed, and it started interacting with another piece of equipment. And therefore we were getting metal shavings in the products and the metal detector wasn’t sensitive enough to catch it.”

This sort of thing has happened more than once, Polito notes, and it’s no small matter for customers to encounter metal in their food. “People think food safety has a lot to do with microbes, but that’s not always the case,” he says. “Foreign material is a big component of food safety as well.”

This issue ties into certification and culture. Expertise comes from training and certification, but it means nothing if the culture doesn’t tie into that as well, Polito asserts. Companies need to foster a culture of find and report rather than find and hide. “Unfortunately, that’s the reality—the culture to find and hide for fear of consequences,” he says.

Preventive maintenance, of course, plays a key role. But referencing again the design for greatness concept, this machine instead had an antiquated design. “It had multiple minor pieces, such as nuts, bolts, and screws, interacting with product over time, and it got into the product, which was causing major issues,” he says.

A key takeaway: “Prevention must be vigorous across an operation, but it’s most important at the source. If we’re just starting with the right design upfront, do we have to worry as much, do we have to put as many resources into this to ensure that we’re preventing issues from occurring?” Polito asks.