New E-Learning Food Safety Tool For Irish Businesses

By Robert McHugh
New E-Learning Food Safety Tool For Irish Businesses

Safefood is encouraging small food businesses to sign up to its new free food safety e-learning training tool, safefoodforbusiness.com.

The tool has been designed to be practical for small food businesses and uses short training modules with real-life scenarios.

Research Shows Concern

This comes after new research from Safefood found that almost two in three (64%) small food businesses say they are extremely concerned about the impact of a poor food safety audit or enforcement on their business.

Just under half (45%) of food businesses claim that ‘food safety and ensuring compliance with regulations’ is their top priority.

While the majority (72%) of food business owners/managers believed they are very knowledgeable about food safety, only 52% feel that their staff are very knowledgeable about the issue.

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'Real Demand'

“When we analyse those who access training at ‘safefood for business.com,’ more than two in three (67%) are learners from the food retail or catering industry followed by almost one in five (17%) in education and 14% working in food or feed processing and production," said Trish Twohig, director of food safety with Safefood.

"With more than 3,000 unique users already, this reflects the real demand that’s out there among food business owners and managers to provide training that’s commensurate with the demands of their staff.”

Track Progress

Safefood has noted that managers and small-business owners can use the tool to track staff progress while training.

The tool is designed for new staff as part of their induction process, as well as re-training staff returning to the industry or as a refresher training.