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Polito’s advice to the restaurants and their suppliers alike is to engage and partner so that you know how to move forward when issues do occur.

Prevention is sweet

The final case that Polito presented was a happier tale—one of prevention through improved hygienic standards. “More and more, we are seeing food suppliers step up and improve their hygienic design programs. And there’s one in particular that we’ve had the pleasure of working with and observing over the last four or five years,” he says. “They’ve made the investment into hygienic design, and every year that I’ve been in there, it is night and day, it’s hard to recognize. They’ve realized a lot of benefits from going this route.”

One particular benefit is a change in culture, Polito notes. Employees see the investment that’s being made, and there’s a sense of pride of ownership. “There are design changes that protect people and there are design changes that make it more e cient to clean and sanitize, and this company has done both,” he says.

To get more wins from the prevention side of food safety and e ciency, Inspire built its own innovation center in 2021. One of the things it does there is to test the hygienic design of equipment. “We want to innovate to keep things e cient and simple,” Polito says. “Hygienic design does not need to be complex. When hygienic design is complex, it poses more challenges, it’s harder to maintain, we’re going to cut more corners.”

In working with suppliers, Polito points to best practices such as getting the approval process right—making sure quality expectations and agreements incorporate sanitary design, for example, and reviewing third-party audits to identify other opportunities. Polito emphasizes the importance of visiting suppliers as well. “How are you going to see it if you’re not there?” he asks. “How are you going to verify those programs that support hygienic design and the data around that?”

It’s also important to set expectations and communicate these concepts to broader teams throughout the organization. “Make sure that you’re training all the right personnel to look out for these things,” Polito adds.