Food Safety and Security

For Sodexo's customers and clients, food safety is a matter of trust. As the largest provider of food and facilities management services in North America, we are deeply committed to providing high quality and safe food service. In fact, each year we put significant resources toward food safety and food safety training.

Sodexo's HACCP Program 
The cornerstone of Sodexo's overall food safety program is a comprehensive food safety and self-inspection program called HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point). The HACCP program is a proactive, systematic approach for maintaining the safety of food products from the time they are delivered until they are served to our customers. Sodexo was one of the first companies in the United States to introduce the program. Key components of Sodexo's HACCP program include:

• Monitoring and controlling the temperatures of foods during cooking, holding, serving, cooling, and reheating.
• Training our foodservice workers in proper hand washing techniques, proper use of disposable gloves, and not allowing sick employees to handle food.
• Training our employees on how to prevent cross-contamination and providing them with tools to do so, such as color-coded cutting boards that can only be used to prepare specific food items.
• Conducting food safety self-inspections at every unit where we handle or produce foods every 30 days.

ServSafe® Certification

ServSafe is a training and certification program sponsored by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. The program, which is nationally recognized as the restaurant industry standard, consists of eight or 16 hours of classroom training on topics related to restaurant food safety, such as basic microbiology, the importance of a comprehensive HACCP program, personal hygiene, sanitation, and pest control. Sodexo requires all foodservice managers and supervisors to be certified in food safety every three years, which exceeds many health department requirements.

Food Safety Resources
Sodexo has assembled a team of Quality Assurance & Food Safety experts who provide comprehensive food safety technical support for each of our 6,000 accounts in North America. Specific resources include on-demand food safety training, facility evaluations, and ensuring the rapid communication of important updates on food safety issues such as national product recalls. The company commits additional resources to validate the food safety programs and processes of each of our units through an independent third-party evaluation.

Food Security

Sodexo spends considerable time and resources identifying and evaluating operational risks. Although our accounts are at minimal risk, we are proactive in our approach to strengthening our existing safety policies and procedures through monitoring current events, drills, roundtable discussions and information sharing with other members of our industry as well as regulatory agencies.

We have a series of product quality assurance guidelines in place to prevent food security incidents, as well as a comprehensive vendor and distributor selection process, and an exhaustive recall system. In the unlikely event that an incident does occur, Sodexo is prepared. Our employees have been trained to follow their client's security procedures and seek immediate guidance from local, state, and federal law enforcement teams.