Your 2019 New Year’s Resolution: Improve Guest Experience to Increase Repeat Visits

Your 2019 New Year’s Resolution: Improve Guest Experience to Increase Repeat Visits

It’s a new year, filled with new hopes and dreams, and a time we make resolutions for ourselves to improve both personally and professionally. What about New Year’s resolutions for our restaurants? How would we like our restaurants to improve in the next year? Chew on this: A study found that 60% of guests said a positive experience will cause them to dine at the restaurant more frequently. Also, researchers found that if you can bring back 5 percent of your customer base in a variety of industries, it could result in a surge in revenue of 25 percent to 125 percent. Imagine your bottom line if more than 5 percent of your guests became repeat visitors?!

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What Can Cruise Lines Teach the Restaurant Industry?

What Can Cruise Lines Teach the Restaurant Industry?

There’s a common misconception about cruise lines that has plagued the industry for years. “The cruise-ship virus” – or Norovirus, as it’s known on land – is most commonly associated with illness outbreaks on cruises. But what does all this have to do with restaurants? Don’t worry – we’re getting there…

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What Should be Included in Your Restaurant’s Body Fluid Clean-Up Policy?

A quality assurance professional is a critical asset to a successful foodservice operation. This individual is responsible for ensuring established food safety processes and procedures are being followed and that quality requirements are being met. This means that you want a person with both experience and knowledge of FDA Food Code and the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in this role.

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Sharing Our Perspective: Top Blog Posts from April – June 2017

We designed FoodSafeTruth.com to be a go-to source for issues and trends impacting the foodservice industry for restaurant owners and operators. One way in which we share the latest industry news is through our blog, Perspectives.

Perspectives is designed to provide you with insights on topics ranging from foodborne illness outbreaks, to building a strong food safety program, to ways to enhance the guest experience. It’s a place where we share news that you can use each and every day.

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Get Your Restaurant Ready. Summer Travel Season is Here.

It’s hard to believe but summer and the summer travel season is almost here. This upcoming weekend marks the unofficial start of summer, and soon people will be hitting the road for vacations, trips to see family and friends and other fun activities. And, most likely their travel will include a stop to relax and grab a bite to eat. With more than 39.3 million US travelers expected to take to the road, skies, rails and water this Memorial Day weekend[1], now is the perfect time to make sure your restaurant is ready. 

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Where Are the Germs Hiding In Your Restaurant?

Your commitment to cleanliness is the cornerstone of your guests’ experience. In fact, according to data from Technomics[1], a restaurant’s cleanliness is one of the top attributes your guests value and one that either keeps or deters them from dining with you again. Cleanliness is also a critical aspect of your restaurant’s food safety program. This means the overall cleanliness of your restaurant not only affects your bottom line, but your restaurant’s reputation as well.  

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Navigating the Landscape to Select the Right Surface Sanitizer for Your Restaurant

Food safety - it’s top of mind for all restaurant owners. But with numerous components of a strong food safety program to consider, it can be difficult for restaurant owners and operators to focus on all areas at all times. 

We know that surface sanitizing and cleaning is a critical component of a solid and effective food safety program. However, with numerous options on the market today, it can be challenging to select the right surface sanitizing and cleaning product that not only meets the needs of the Food Code, but kills common foodborne pathogens, like Norovirus, and meets the needs of your restaurant’s workers and guests as well.

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365 Days and Counting of FoodSafeTruth.com

It's hard to believe, but it has more than a year since FoodSafeTruth.com was launched. The site, which is sponsored by GOJO, was developed with the vision of being your go-to source for food safety information – delivering timely information on building, maintaining and enhancing your restaurant’s food safety program. From blog posts to bulletins on the state of the industry and norovirus prevention, we believe this vision has become a reality.

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Guest Data Helps Restaurants to Deliver on the Guest Experience

As a restaurant owner or operator your main goal is to provide an experience in your restaurant that keeps guests coming back. Yet, there can be challenges to creating a strong guest experience and building customer loyalty as competition increases throughout the industry. So how can you overcome these challenges? How can you set your restaurant apart from the others?

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The Future Looks Bright for Food Safety: The Cultivation of Human Norovirus Has Been Achieved!

Norovirus is one of the most common foodborne illnesses and is the leading cause of illness and outbreaks from contaminated food in the United States.  Leading health experts recommend hand hygiene and cleaning and disinfecting contaminated surfaces as two measures restaurant workers can take to reduce the transmission of norovirus. Yet, how do we know if the products we are using are effective in killing norovirus?

Laboratory Testing – Cultivating the Virus
In order to test product efficacy against human noroviruses (HuNoVs), we need to cultivate viruses in cells in laboratory conditions. Different from bacteria and fungi that grow in a Petri dish, which contains a medium such as food for their replication, viruses need alive host cells in order to replicate, or make copies of themselves. In some instances, we can keep some of these cells alive outside of the host organism, and under the right conditions, get viruses to infect these cells and replicate in a laboratory. Once this point is reached, it opens up enormous possibilities for research.

The major barrier in research and development of effective interventions for HuNoVs has been the lack of a robust and reproducible in vitro cultivation system. HuNoVs have been difficult to be cultivated in vitro despite numerous efforts over the last 40 years.

The lack of a reproducible culture system for HuNoVs has forced scientists researching norovirus to use surrogates for studies and for testing disinfectants and other products to show efficacy against the Human Norovirus. Many products available in the market today that claim Norovirus efficacy are based on tests using HuNoVs surrogates. However, despite several similarities surrogates have with HuNoVs, they are not the same.

A Breakthrough in Science
The good news, a group of scientists from Baylor College of Medicine have successfully cultured the human norovirus in intestinal cells. This culture system simulates the human intestinal epithelium, permits human host-pathogen studies of previously non-cultivatable pathogens, and allows the assessment of methods to prevent and treat HuNoV infections such as vaccines, therapeutics and other measures to control the virus in humans, including how we manage norovirus transmission. The new methodology has been tested in different research labs thorough the country and has shown reproducibility and viability.

Although it may take some time for the in-vitro methodology to be available at commercial labs, it is a first step towards measuring how effective disinfectants and food processes are in inactivating infectious HuNovs, which can lead to enhanced guidelines for preventing virus spread, and better products that show efficacy against HuNovs.

So what does this breakthrough in science mean to restaurant owners and operators? It means that as science advances so will your surface disinfecting and sanitizing products. Be sure to be aware of claims products make and ask questions about the safety and effectiveness of the products. You want to be certain the product has been tested against common viruses to ensure the safety of your employees and guests.

For more details, read:
Replication of human noroviruses in stem cell–derived human enteroids
BY KHALIL ETTAYEBI, SUE E. CRAWFORD, KOSUKE MURAKAMI, JAMES R. BROUGHMAN, UMESH KARANDIKAR, VICTORIA R. TENGE, FREDERICK H. NEILL, SARAH E. BLUTT, XI-LEI ZENG, LIN QU,BAIJUN KOU, ANTONE R. OPEKUN, DOUGLAS BURRIN, DAVID Y. GRAHAM, SASIREKHA RAMANI,ROBERT L. ATMAR, MARY K. ESTES
PUBLISHED ONLINE25 AUG 2016
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf5211