Is your COVID-19 plan sustainable?

So you are either sitting at your desk at home reading this whilst you work from home or are part of an essential business and you are at your desk at work. Or you may be someone who has completely unexpectedly lost their job from a food business. A situation which only two months ago would not have even been considered

These sure are interesting times.

There is an awful lot of information coming at us every day, or even every hour with this virus happening and it can get really confusing about what needs to be done and how.

The basics in a food business have not changed however, if your business has been practising good food safety controls up until now, the same rules and processes continue to apply, good handwashing, good cleaning, stock rotation, temperature control etc etc.

What has changed in the food business is the actual business and it’s impact on the staff.

There are many businesses in the food industry which are struggling to survive whilst others are going gangbusters and having some of the busiest times they have ever had. Every single food business is directly impacted, some have let staff go, others are trying to keep them on, even if at reduced hours and still others are desperately trying to find more staff to fulfil the huge amount of work now being done.

The food industry as we have known it has gone and it will never be the same again as this outbreak has highlighted many issues which will now require significant changes to what we do and how we do it. As an example, there will have to be reviews by manufacturers about where do their raw materials come from and is that something which is sustainable.

The whole concept of business sustainability is about doing what is needed to ensure the future of the business in terms of financial, legal and social impacts. The whole idea has been through into total chaos by this outbreak.

What we have to do now is keep things moving so we can keep our staff (which is really our most valuable asset) and customer base, but just as important we have to start looking at how can we be sustainable into the future.

Good businesses are not only working to keep going now, they are learning and planning for what needs to happen to keep going in the future.

To put it in the language of HACCP, what we are doing now are the Corrective Actions for the immediate problem which is this COVID-19 outbreak, and what we also need to be working on is the Preventative Actions required to ensure that the business, it’s staff and customers are protected if something like this happens again.