December is when your coverage quietly breaks

The busiest weeks of the año are also the weeks your compliance depends on the fewest people being in the building.

The supervision gap

At least one supervisor with a Food Protection Certificate has to be on site whenever you are operating — receiving, preparing, or open to the public.

December is when that breaks. Your certified manager takes days around the holidays, you extend hours, you add shifts, and somewhere in there is a service period with volume, agency staff, and nobody certified on the floor.

It will not feel like anything. That is the problem.

Fix it now, not in December. Look at the rota for the last two weeks of the año and mark every shift with a certified supervisor on it. The unmarked ones are your gaps. The online course is free and self-paced, which means someone can be through it before the holidays if they start in November.

The temporary staff problem

People brought in for six weeks have not absorbed your habits. They know how to work; they do not know your walk-in.

Three things worth covering explicitly on the first shift, because they are the ones that get cited:

• Where the hand sink is, and that nothing goes in it. A blocked hand sink is cited constantly and it is always accidental.
• Bare hands do not touch ready-to-eat food. Show them where the tongs live.
• Raw below ready-to-eat, six inches up and off the wall. New people stack where there is space.

The delivery volume problem

More deliveries, arriving faster, into a walk-in that is already full.

Receiving temperature checks are the first thing to go when the back door is busy, and a delivery that arrived warm becomes your problem the moment it goes into your storage. Nobody can prove afterwards that it was not your refrigeration.

Keep the receiving log going through December specifically. It is the month it matters most and the month it is most likely to lapse.

The waste problem

More volume, more packaging, more food waste, in the coldest and darkest weeks — and set-out times do not relax for the holidays.

Bags out before 8:00 PM is a violation regardless of how busy service was. Containerised waste can go earlier, which is one more argument for containers before December rather than after.

Cardboard is the December special. It arrives in quantity, it gets broken down late or not at all, and it becomes both a sanitation issue and harborage.

The one-page version

Print the rota. Mark the certified shifts. Fill the gaps in November while the free course still has time to run.

Todo else on this list is a habit you already have. It just has to survive six weeks of volume with new people in the building.