Executive Summary

The Alberta Workforce Essential Skills (AWES) working with the Alberta Restaurant and Foodservices Association (ARFA) and Alberta's Training for Excellence Corporation (ATEC), undertook to investigate the impact of the implementation of the new food safety certification regulations in relationship to workers' essential skills. The province of Alberta through Alberta Health and Wellness, as of April 2005, is increasing the requirement for food operations to employ a minimum of one worker per shift with certification in food sanitation and hygiene. There is the potential that all food-handling employees may require certification in the future.

The goals of the impact study were to research the correlation between food safety training and essential skills and to lay the foundation for the development of user-friendly, practical training materials for food safety certification. The specific objectives were to:

1. Identify potential skill gaps and essential skills training needs for workers required to pass food sanitation and hygiene certification.
2. Review current food safety training materials.
3. Assess readability and design of food safety training materials considering those with limited essential and language skills.
4. Recommend practical strategies and solutions for addressing identified needs.

The methodology that the research team used to meet these objectives was a case study approach. They met with and interviewed industry representatives from eleven food establishments in Alberta. In order to get a variety of responses from which to generalize, selected operations in the study represented a cross-section of food establishments from small to large, fast food to fine dining, and rural to urban. Additional data were collected in a telephone survey of fifteen operations in Edmonton; the observation of a training class; conversations with trainers and a project leader with Alberta Health and Wellness; and the review of training resources.

The results of the research show the food safety is increasingly becoming a critical environmental issue of the decade and a major concern for the industry and for the general public. It was concluded that food safety training and certification should have a broader outreach. Most interviewees, from managers to supervisors to front line servers, readily endorsed the need for everyone in the food industry to become well-informed about safe food handling.

A number of barriers to food safety training and certification were identified. Food operations struggle with constraints imposed by lack of time, the production cycle, high turnover of staff, training accessibility and convenience, availability of course offerings, cost burdens to employers and employees, and language and essential skills limitations. Categorically, smaller food operations and operations in rural areas experience more of the barriers.