Impact Study: Essential Skills and Food Sanitation and Hygiene Training

An unstable staff and high staff turnover are barriers to formalized food safety training.
Managers do not conduct training because they are "too busy putting out other fires – understaffing, people leaving, trying to hire new waitresses."
Because turnover is so high, managers are concerned that employees will leave after they have invested in the training and certification. They have no guarantee that they will re-hire certified employees.

Planning and organizing training according to production is a challenge. Flexibility has to be specifically built into the production cycle.
When training is done through a third party provider, courses have to be organized around the provider's schedule. "This doesn't always coincide with our needs since occasionally we would like to train more often."

Employers in one community "would not do training and the certification because it's not necessary and they don't worry about it".
Some think they know all they need to know. "We're only responsible for the front of house. We don't really need any training around that. We know how (customers) like to treated by a waitress."
The course had not been offered by their company and even if it had, they would not pay for it on their own.
Long term employees' negative attitudes affect their commitment to taking formal training. "New and inexperienced workers should be given the training since they are more teachable, more compliant and open to learning."
Employees in rural areas tended not to place the same emphasis on food safety training as did their counterparts in urban regions where accessibility and exposure to the food safety process is more common place.

Some said they did not want to take any more training in the food services area because "they were not planning to stay in the business".
Employees, in a transitional career phase, do not identify food services work as a vocation, thus, employment in the food services industry is an entry level stepping stone to other future employment.

"Cooks became an authentic trade only 8-9 years ago. It's still a struggle because they do not get nearly the hourly pay that another trade journeyman does. No one in the food services industry wants to commit $200 for food safe training and then go back to work to make $7 or 8 an hour at work."