Need Your Help With Training Employees / Cheese Plant

Hello Guys/Gals~

I work as a QA/QC Supervisor at a food ( Dairy, Cheese, Yogurt, Milk ) plant. 98% of the production employers are Hispanic non-English speakers. This company deals with a lot of hands on packaging and hand handling the product so sanitation is of vital and major importance. Sadly, most of these employers dont get the training/education on the importance of food safety when hired. I started working not too long here so I want to work on a plan to educate these people; I believe that educating these people is the first and most important step in QA/QC for the company since they are the ones doing most of the food handling. I simply want to ask you guys for as many ideas possible on what to educate/train them on and how to go about this. I am pretty new to the food safety/QA world so all of your experience will be greatly appreciated. What should I focus on? How would I go about teaching them? Should I talk about HACCP? I know I will include GMPs, food microbiology, but what else?

Sincerely,

Jorge

dear jorge...

IMEX .. training how to wash hand can give you positive effect, because most of Micro can reduce by washing hands... And i suggest to make "hygiene handbook".. that book containt some information about food safety practices .. i using that book to give food safety information to all of employees .. and the result is we can increase the knowledge of employee...and we can practice our FSMS syatem better then before..

Hope can help you...

Hi Jorge

If I were you I would focus more on the basics than on microbiology - it can get far too deep and if people don't understand, then they won't be able to implement the training in the workplace, which is what you need!

Explain the rules regarding dress code and how to put it on, handwashing is particualrly important - you can get products that highlight areas where hands haven't been washed properly (it shows up under an ultra violet light) and rules regarding jewellery, eating etc are important tomessages to get through first - these are the basics of food hygiene - to make it more relevant and fun, think about getting them to practice and perhaps take some photos so they can spot the hazards and bad practice, getting people involved is always better and more effective than just preaching at them.

You could do 'hazard spot' exercises and get them to circle problems on pictures or photos and could use this as evidence of training, also we find that competitions (crosswords, wordsearch, spot the difference) and 'focus' weeks work well and generate a better general food safety culture - you could then follow this up with regualr short training sessions on other subjects.

Lastly, none of this works unless it is backed up on the factory floor, supervisors need to remind staff of the rules and managers need to lead by example and make sure they follow the rules as well as enforce them!



Hope this gives you some ideas!

Dear Jorge,

I deleted yr duplicate post since this thread seems adequate.

Welcome to the forum !

Rgds / Charles.C

PS - also slightly modified topic title - hope that's OK

PPS - regarding yr question, I presume you are seeking guides in Spanish or ?? If so, there are instructional food videos available produced in UK / USA plus self - instructional materials. Many of these are refeenced in other threads on this forum.

@BTW, Welcome to the forum Judith. Seem to be a lot of new faces from UK appearing lately. Some new abstracting service I assume.

Dear Jorge,

The inputs from AS Nur and Judith are very good. Basic thing is the most needful thing, indeed.

I have this poster from Codex, hope it may might helps you to explain to the employees:
http://www.who.int/f...en/5keys_en.pdf

If your employees have some barrier in language, you can try download the other version of the poster:
http://www.who.int/f...sumer/5keys/en/

I also have this one from FSA:
http://www.food.gov....dfs/tentips.pdf
It's a food safety tip for cooking at home, but IMO you can gave it to them for creating good-habit at their home. And we hope they will bring the good-habit to their work. As someone always said: practice makes perfect (oh.. how cliche..).

BTW, I think you should put this topic at the Food Safety Discussion, and not making double topic with the same content. At first time, I did this too, and I realize its not a good practice afterall.


Regards,


Arya

I know that it can be difficult to train employees when there are communication limitations.
A really great resource that I have used in the past is the OR-OSHA website.
It's the Oregon Occupational Safety & Health.
They've got everything you could ask for in both Spanish and English.
I've used this site as a resource when I have to train seasonal employees.
One of the good things is that some of the manuals will contain both english and spanish versions of the same training material.
so everyone is on the same page- so to speak.
Hope this helps, and good luck!!

Jorge, saludos desde Guatemala!
Another place you might want to look is the AIBonline site. Most of their posters are in English and Spanish. They also have videos for Spanish speakers.
It´s a good idea to encourage people to implement GMPs at home. That way they´ll become habits and won´t be easily forgotten, aside from helping them stay healthy.

Hello Jorge,

Another idea, beside the previews, is talk about cross contamination so they can understand the importance of GMP.
Show them pictures so they can realize the importance and get "scary" too

Best Regards

Andreia

I'd start with the basics; personal hygiene. I'd do a training session on that alone. In it, I'd cover handwashing, jewellery, clothing etc etc. You can make it fun and interactive.

HACCP can wait, if you have no personal hygiene standards, you're stuffed! If you're really concerned about HACCP not being in place, I'd pick out the people doing the monitoring and train them but wait for the others.

Next bit I'd tackle would be cleaning standards.

Dear LatinQAQC / Jorge,

Did any of the above suggestions help at all ?

Rgds / Charles.C

Dear All,

i have faced the same problem in my previous job. what i did is, trained some supervisors itself and the trained supervisors trained other employees. in my training slides i gave more importance to personal hygiene and other basics (not anything regarding HACCP & Microbiology). in the working area included more posters, we edited the posters in different languagaes that is suitable for employees.

Thank You