Surprised at a food safety issue I saw at a grocery store

Stopped by a local BR grocer the other day. Noticed in between customers checking out, they had their cashier putting the famous chicken salad stickers onto the plastic quart containers they are sold in. You know, you buy a plastic container of chicken salad and there’s a label/sticker on it with the grocery store name.

At first I thought what a great way to have your employees work. When they aren’t checking someone out, have them fulfilling needed tasks. After all, they sell a ton of chicken salad weekly, so they have many containers that need stickers.

But then I realized the issue. The plastic containers are sealed from the supplier and the supplier guarantees they are ready for food contact (sanitized to put food in them). Now, you have cashiers, who are not washing their hands, handling these food contact containers at their cash registers using the register counter which isn’t sanitized and ready for food.

So the cashier takes my money, handles cash and coins, and then goes back to putting his hands on the container. He touches the outside and then puts the inside of the next container on top of the outside of the previous container he just touched. So they are now, in food safety contexts, contaminated. And then they will put food in the container and sell it.



Now, as someone who works in food safety and food processing, I can tell you this is a HUGE issue for food safety and a TERRIBLE habit for this grocery store to do.



In reality, it’s no big deal and it’s not going to make me stop buying their products. And I’m not trying to make an issue out of this, and I’m not trying to complain. But I found it an interesting example of improper food safety at a grocery store and thought I would share it. The more proper food safety habits we know, the better off we all are.


You can say they would do the same thing in the deli with the deli workers, but in practice, the deli workers should be prepped to handle food and have clean surfaces and clean hands.