VII Principles USA

Move beyond the Binder

For our team at VII Principles USA, consistency starts with making food safety practical. Food safety can’t live in a binder on a shelf in the manager’s office. It has to live within the operation as part of the day to day grind. 

That starts from the top down. Managers and chefs must communicate expectations consistently, but they also must lead by example. Chefs need to work alongside their teams, reinforce good practices in real time and make food safety part of the daily conversation.

The strongest operations understand that food safety is a culture. It’s built through repetition, communication, accountability and leadership. When those principles become part of how the team operates, employees stop viewing food safety as an additional task and begin viewing it as standard practice.

That’s when you know food safety has moved beyond compliance and become part of the operation itself.

Let Patterns Reveal the Root Cause

Audits are the foundation of food safety. When our team walks into an operation, we’re not there just to point out what’s wrong. We want to understand the “why.”

An audit provides much more information than simply a pass or fail. It’s a snapshot in time of an operation and over time, those snapshots begin to tell a story. Maybe we continue to see the same temperature-control issue, date-marking violation, sanitation concern, or breakdown in employee practices.

At that point, correcting the individual violation isn’t enough. Is there a training issue? Is equipment contributing to the problem? Is there a breakdown in management oversight or communication? Or is the system itself failing the employee?

That’s where auditing becomes powerful.

As an inspector, those details matter because they allow us to provide more meaningful guidance to the operation. A single audit provides a snapshot, but multiple audits establish trends. As those trends are uncovered, leadership can begin looking beyond the surface, identifying root causes and taking a proactive approach to food safety. That is the real value of an audit. It isn’t simply about finding what’s wrong today. It’s about understanding why it happened so we can help prevent it from happening tomorrow.

Help People Understand What They Protect

Accountability starts with leadership, clear expectations and defining the standard. Food safety is no different from any other critical part of a business operation. There are goals, guidelines and systems that must be followed, and employees need to understand what is expected of them.

Once that standard has been established, it must be consistently reinforced. Accountability sets the stage for a culture of food safety.

“Food safety can’t be rushed. It has to be intentional.”

Foodservice moves fast. When an operation gets busy, employees are going to fall back on the habits and culture that have been built around them. If a manager walks past the same food safety issue every day without addressing it, eventually that issue becomes normal. In a way, silence begins to define the standard.

On the other hand, when managers and chefs consistently recognize good practices, correct poor ones and explain why the standards matter, employees begin to rally around those expectations. They start to understand how their individual responsibility affects the success of the entire operation.

That's when food safety becomes more personal.

Accountability goes beyond discipline. Sometimes it's as simple as asking, "How can we help each other be successful?" Maybe an employee needs additional training. Maybe leadership hasn't communicated the expectation clearly enough. Accountability should allow us to have those conversations. Ultimately, accountability becomes strongest when people understand not only what they are responsible for, but who and what they are protecting.

People Remain the Catalyst

AI, technology, data and automation are having a significant impact on food safety. What excites me is the opportunity these tools give operators to become more proactive without adding significant time or complexity to their day-to-day operations.

At VII Principles USA, we’ve adopted many of these emerging tools in partnership with our clients, including automated temperature monitoring, centralized reporting, digital inspections and trend analysis. That intelligence allows leadership to better focus its attention where it’s needed most. For example, if I can look across several locations within a restaurant group and identify similar violations, the conversation with leadership becomes much more impactful. We’re no longer discussing an isolated issue at one restaurant. Now we can ask whether there is a larger opportunity involving training, procedures, equipment, communication, or the organization as a whole.

But there’s another side to this that I think is extremely important: food safety is interpersonal.

Food safety is rooted in human interaction and communication. Technology and data can tell us what is happening, but people are still the catalyst for action. People have to coach, correct, teach, communicate and ultimately build the culture.

Technology can provide the intelligence, but people have to provide the action.

Wisdom from Experience

For me, one of the greatest lessons has been understanding the balance between knowledge and being personable. You absolutely need to understand the regulations and science behind food safety. But being personable, approachable, authentic, consistent and operating with integrity are powerful too.

I remember when I first started conducting facility inspections, one of my goals when meeting a new operator was to “disarm the operator.” There is naturally a level of anxiety that comes with an inspection. For most operators, food safety isn’t necessarily the fun part of running a restaurant. Sometimes walking through the door with an iron-fist approach creates a barrier before the inspection even begins.

So, I learned to start with the person. Get to know them. Talk to them. Listen. Once that comfort is established, people begin to open up. You gain their attention and, eventually, their trust. That’s when you can make a real impact.

Spend time in kitchens and interact with the staff. Understand their reality. What happens when the restaurant gets busy, a guest complains, the lowboy refrigerator isn’t holding temperature, or three employees call out before a shift? Understanding those realities helps us build food safety into the operation rather than adding another task that doesn’t fit the puzzle.

Every operation teaches you something. Never lose sight of the responsibility that comes with this profession. We aren’t just protecting companies from violations or failed inspections. We’re protecting employees, guests, businesses, reputations and ultimately, people’s health. Food safety can’t be rushed. It has to be intentional.