Outside-In Restaurant Food Safety

Third-party auditors can be a cost-effective, quality-enhancing solution for monitoring food-safety standards.

By Derek Gale, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 9/1/2007

Outside auditors can bring objectivity, a new perspective and value-added services to operations such as Noodles & Company.

Until this year, Debe Nagy-Nero, director of quality assurance, nutrition and safety for Vancouver, Wash.-based The Holland Inc., was auditing each of the company’s 39 Burgerville restaurants three or four times a year. "I’ve put a lot of mileage on my car," she says.

As the sole staff of her department, Nagy-Nero also had to balance other responsibilities with the audits. Then in January, she brought in an outside auditor.

"In talking about expanding the company, we wanted a system in place where we could continue to monitor the restaurants without sending a corporate person to be there all the time," she says.

Nagy-Nero plans to continue to do in-house auditing, just less frequently. "The third-party auditor is doing it three times a year, and we’re looking at possibly doing it one or two times a year in-house," she says.

"We think we need both perspectives," she continues. "If I’m the one doing the audits, I’m looking for things maybe a bit differently than the third party. But someone from the outside [can] pick up on things maybe I may have overlooked for all these years. And that person can bring the perspective of having seen other operations."

In addition to receiving Nagy-Nero’s and the third party’s semi-annual audits, all Burgerville restaurants do their own audits once a month, creating a three-layer safety system.

Mike Gross, quality-assurance manager at Denver-based fast-casual chain Noodles & Company, also appreciates the flexibility a third-party auditor affords the company.

He says Noodles & Company has an aggressive growth plan for the next few years, and the company needed a third-party auditor that easily could scale to that. Choosing one that has staff in all major cities makes the process easy and cost-effective, he says.

"We were looking at adding a full-time person, but economically it didn’t make any sense," he notes.

Value Added

Besides being a sensible solution for large and/or growing operators, third-party auditors boast qualities that can make their services worthwhile to any food-safety program, operators say.

"A third party can be a bit more objective, because of their distance from day-to-day operations," Gross says. "It helps as well when dealing with franchisees—they know that they’re being held to the same standard, that there’s not a bias for corporate versus franchise [stores]."

Gaining access to software for handling audits also is a key benefit, Gross says. "To develop that in house would be problematic at best, with lots of trial and error," he explains. "How do you handle that much data and get it back to the point where it is something reportable, so you have useful, actionable information?"

Most third-party auditors cover data collection, input, analysis and reports. Nagy-Nero notes that many will offer other services, such as conducting audits of a client’s suppliers or helping operators locate food labs.

Finally, some operators note that third-party auditors make them feel more comfortable about "what-if" scenarios. For example, they say, in the case of a food-safety issue arising, third-party auditors might play better to outsiders looking in.

"I would feel better about having a third party," Gross says. "I’m sure it would help to have an independent look at any issue."