Case Study: Canadian Food Safety Group



SITUATION

Regulating food safety in a climate of expanding dietary concerns, increased access to imported foods and emerging bacteria and contaminants has made safe food handling practices critical. With tens of thousands of restaurants, cafeterias, and fast food outlets across the country, this is no small effort. Each province across Canada has some form of mandatory training, but it does not require all staff who handle food go through food safety training. Research shows that regular training and certification of food safety for all staff within an establishment, results in a higher degree of compliance with food safety standards. Ongoing training and regular brush-ups results in even higher rates of compliance. At Canadian Safety Group, our passion and mandate is to see the highest level of compliance possible.

SOLUTION

Education will always trump consequence. Increasing access to ongoing and progressive training not only creates a safer food industry, it also creates more cohesive and aligned teams with a greater sense of pride in the product being delivered to the customer. Food preparation is both an art and a science – and in this case you can’t have one without the other. An affordable and highly accessible modality of training is now being offered through Canadian Food Safety Group with online proctoring that is provided by Integrity Advocate.

CHALLENGE

The food and beverage industry is not known for its glamorous wages. Most often jobs are held by hardworking individuals, supporting a family or funding an education. Training needs to be accessible, flexible and affordable. It is also critical for the establishment to see the incredible value in having all staff trained on safe food handling procedures. We knew that delivering training online would help us meet our mandate of increasing compliance nationwide. Four years ago, we made the important decision to deliver proctored training online. The proctoring piece was absolutely imperative as we needed to validate identity and ensure authenticity of the course and testing, but we also needed to maintain our highly affordable model. In-person proctoring did not accomplish these goals and so we looked for a partner who would help us achieve these lofty goals in a digital format.

RESULTS

Offering our training courses online through a proctoring application allowed us to reduce the cost of our training services, and we have passed every penny of that savings onto our students. It was important to us to have a local solution. We are a Canadian company and wanted to support another Canadian company. This also has had the added benefit of incredible access to a strong support team at Integrity Advocate and the peace of mind in knowing that we had a premium proctoring solution that met all of our requirements.