Quality Control in Restaurants

In restaurants maintaining quality becomes a challenge to control if the business wants to succeed. The control plan is a useful tool composed by a series of inspection points and checklists to obtain systematic feedback concerning predetermined quality and consistency standards. The plan can design several forms to control and monitor different activities and these can be related to guest service, food quality, front of house cleanliness or back of house cleanliness.

One example to apply this knowledge could be the hygiene plan. According to the sanitary standard for the operation of restaurants and related services (Real Decreto 3484/2000), restaurants are not considered a food industry; hence it is not necessary to have a sanitary registry but each municipality is in charge of controlling with an inspector all services so every restaurant must carry out a cleanliness plan including: temperature controls, disinfection processes, training of manipulators, pest control, maintenance of facilities, water consumption control and waste disposal. 

Example of Food Waste Tracking Sheet

All these points can be monitored within the control plan following an organized template with comprehensive rating systems, scoreboards, room for notes and comments, and actions for improving deficient areas. However, another area of control can be employees’ performance for example setting standards of performance and controlling their productivity writing highly detailed statements for each member, or through opinion surveys.

Another useful tool can be the Traffic Light System, the most effective inspection tool to reduce defect generation at source. This is a random visual inspection system for highlighting quality issues in sewing line. It includes 3 quality signal cards: green (good quality), yellow (warning condition), and red (stopping the production due to quality fault). It works like this making easier to establish corrective and preventive actions:

1. Green card: When a worker produces quality product or delivers a service with zero defect.

2. Yellow card: When a worker does a single fault so he/she should be more careful about quality for the next time.

3. Red card: When the worker does multiple faults, it indicates that this worker is producing several faults that should be corrected and an extra care should be taken to this worker.

Example of Traffic Light System

References:

Hostage, G. (1975). ‘Quality Control in a Service Business’. Harvard Business Review. Available from: https://hbr.org/1975/07/quality-control-in-a-service-business

Plan Higiene (2015). ‘Seguridad alimentaria en bares y restaurantes’. Available from: https://goo.gl/RJg9aV

Junta de Andalucía (2010). ‘Requisitos simplificados de higiene’. Consejería de Salud. Available from: https://goo.gl/29ERQc

Sarkar, P. (2011). ´Traffic Light System for Quality Inspection´. OCS. Available from: http://www.onlineclothingstudy.com/2012/01/traffic-light-system-for-quality.html