Why should retailers put food safety at the forefront of their foodservice efforts?

We have a big foodservice program here at Kwik Trip. Food Safety has to be a really integral part of that. When we started preparing and serving food over 20 years ago, before my time here, there were some big national foodborne-illness outbreaks that made our leadership realize we needed to begin building up our food safety programs as we got more into foodservice.

For some people there’s a stigma with gas station food still today, and we and a lot of other convenience stores are fighting back on that pretty hard to become a food destination for our guests. Not only is it not acceptable to get people sick from the food that you’re serving, but it’s going to reflect poorly on your convenience store and the convenience store industry as a whole. When we talk about this, we often say food safety isn’t a competitive advantage in our industry. Everyone should be putting it at the forefront if they’re involved in the procurement, sale and preparation of food.

We always say that hand in hand with the sale of the food has to be the safety and quality of the food. Another phrase that we often use is “Sell more food safely.” We have Food Service District Leaders who are responsible for stores in a specific area of our footprint. Their focus is the foodservice teams in those stores and training these coworkers. They also focus on food safety. Essentially half of their job is food safety—training, audits, corrective action plans and emergency response.

One in six people in the United States gets a foodborne illness every year. Three thousand people, unfortunately, die from that every year. Our goal is to protect public health as well as the brand. If people understand the why behind it, food safety stops being just another task that they have to do and becomes more of your culture. We want food safety culture developed to where food safety practices just become the norm every day.

Kwik Trip is vertically integrated. We have multiple food production facilities here on our campus. We make a lot of food ourselves, and we’ve seen that food is our future. It makes up a lot of our sales, a lot of our gross profit, and it’s growing. Convenience stores can take more and more market share. As we continue to try and grow that and focus more on that, the food safety aspect just has to be there.

For a smaller operator, the best advice is to try and develop relationships with regulators, even if you’re just talking to your local inspector and understanding what their expectations are and what they see coming down the pipeline as far as future food code changes. Having those relationships makes life a lot easier. Communicating with regulators and having a partnership with them is important. Also, try to identify someone in the industry who you can bounce ideas off of. We can learn a lot from talking to each other.