First off I want to say that it is great, according to recent news stories that the woman who drank the lye laced sweet tea at Dickey's BBQ is doing better.
This blog isn't to condemn Dickey's as an organization. The owners and managers of the unit in question need to be dealt with because there were some serious management lapses: from hiring to training to storage of chemicals to preparation of food.
The fact is we work in a difficult industry. The restaurant industry is so dispersed, Subway has over 30,000 locations. The food that we purchase and cook comes from around the world. Most importantly a large portion of our workforce are not professionals. They are young, inexperienced workers who are entrusted with our customer's health and our brand/livelihoods on a daily basis.
According to Statista.com in 2014, it is estimated that there will be 13.5 million employees in the restaurant industry. The US Department of Labor states that more than 21% of these restaurant industry workers were in the age range from 16 to 19 years old, which is five times higher than all other industries. I'm not stating that the person who poisoned the tea was young, but they were inexperienced and momentarily stupid. Quite frankly I'm surprised that these events don't happen more often with the amount of restaurants in this country.
The only way to combat mistakes like what happened at Dickey's is through consistent daily execution and management efficacy. As manager's, we can't take it for granted that our employees are checking this stuff or even know better. We have to combine training with idiot proofing and daily inspections to catch this stuff before someone makes this type of mistake.
We at Mobile Inspector have a developed a tablet based checklist and inspection platform. When a company follows our best practice model of daily checklists and temp logs, they run better more consistent operations. That is a big first step to stopping this stuff before it happens.
To learn more about Mobile Inspector, please go to MobileInspector.biz
