For organizations that deal with food—restaurants, catering businesses, grocery stores—safety should be a top priority. Food safety is essential for customer health, and it’s also top-of-mind for consumers when choosing a food product. 69% of consumers are even willing to pay more if a product has a food safety certification.
By training staff in food safety techniques and procedures, you’ll reduce the chance of exposing your customers to foodborne illnesses or accidental allergic reactions. Along with protecting your customers, food safety training is required by law. Providing this education protects your customers and safeguards your business against steep fines, lawsuits, and the loss of your business license. There are many pre-made food handler certification programs available, but it’s also important for employees to understand the specifics of food safety at your business.
And while it may seem complicated to create custom food safety training for your company, it doesn’t have to be. With video, custom food safety training is as easy as pie.
Why use video courses for food safety training?
Video courses are a great supplement to in-person training. They can be more effective for some use cases, too—especially when it comes to food safety. Training videos help you visualize procedures and are more sustainable to create and reference on an on-going basis. Learn2Serve uses Vyond animation in the video below to explain why food safety training videos are important for any restaurant:
Demonstrate procedures
While basic food safety training is required by law before employees start working for you, it won’t train them on the procedures specific to the equipment you use. By demonstrating equipment-specific procedures, employees will better understand how you stay compliant with food safety laws and ensure the safety of your customers.
With video, you can explain and demonstrate procedures with visuals to help employees learn by example. Unlike in-person learning, video training allows employees to replay demonstrations to reinforce their understanding of the material. Video training also reduces the amount of time needed for shadowing, which gives managers greater bandwidth.
The animated video below explains cleaning and sanitizing policies. Animated videos are typically easier to create and update than live-action videos.
The example above—created in Vyond Studio—is available to Vyond customers as a customizable video template.
CUSTOMIZE THIS FOOD SAFETY TEMPLATE
This next video shows safety procedures specific to this kitchen. By placing the employee in a familiar environment, they’ll understand the order and location for each procedure from the moment they arrive.
Refresh employee knowledge
Every food handler must follow dozens of procedures to ensure food safety, including personal hygiene, sanitation, cross-contamination prevention, proper cooking and cooling procedures, and how to serve and store food—just to name a few. It’s worth having regular refresher training with your employees so that food safety stays top of mind.
It can be cumbersome, though, to set up face-to-face training every time employees need to refresh their knowledge. Video training is easy to reference and access when employees need it.
And compared to shooting live video, creating animated video training saves time and resources. You can easily update videos in animation software instead of needing to reshoot film when procedure details or laws change.
Save money
Once you create a video course, your organization can use it continuously. When employees need to brush up on a knowledge gap or learn a new skill, you can refer them to your training videos as a first step.
And if you use an animated video software like Vyond, you’ll be able to create and update food safety training videos at a fraction of the cost compared to hiring or purchasing. You also won’t need to pay for film equipment, props, and other live video expenses.
3 tips for creating food safety training courses
There’s quite a bit that goes into making an effective food safety training course. Consider these best practices when you start planning your videos.
Gather your resources in advance
Before you make your video, look up any local laws you want to reference. For example, you may need to refer to laws on specific meat-cooking temperatures, filling a customer’s reusable container, hygiene, or expiration-date marking. If you want to use a case study to illustrate the importance of food safety, now is the time to confirm you have all the details. Collect any existing written procedures that you want to demonstrate as well.
With all your resources gathered in advance, you can script your video, storyboard your scenes, and record or animate quickly.
Get buy-in from employees
If you force unwilling employees to comply, the training won’t necessarily be effective. If team members understand the importance of the training, they’ll be more likely to use the principles they learn on the job.
Consider explaining why food safety training is important at the beginning of your video. You might use stats on the prevalence of food allergies or foodborne illness. Or, share a real-life example of the consequences of not following food safety protocol.
This video illustrates a real-life botulism poisoning incident using custom animated drawings.
The video explains how inattentiveness to proper food safety procedures resulted in 10 people getting botulism poisoning and caused one young father to lose his life. Using a specific example clarifies the importance of food safety protocols and encourages buy-in from employees.
Use a learning management system
To host your training courses, learning management systems (LMSs) are available in a wide range of pricing models for your budget and use case. An LMS will serve as a host for your food safety training courses. Some learning management software also lets you assign courses to employees and organize them in a central, accessible location.
Make sure you choose an LMS with an assessment feature. Food safety information is very detailed, so employees may struggle to retain everything they learn. Assessments help you identify knowledge gaps so you can assign additional trainings as needed and ensure employees are retaining food safety information to keep your workplace safe. If you need to test the waters before selecting a more robust paid plan GoSkills and EduFlow both offer free options for smaller businesses.
Create food safety training videos with Vyond
Vyond’s animated video software makes it easy to create professional-quality food safety training videos—no prior video experience needed.
Speeding up video creation, our templates and prebuilt scenes include a wide range of character outfits and actions that suit the food industry. Update videos in minutes if any procedures or laws change; there’s no need to record or re-animate from scratch.
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