Food Cooling Practice Improvements

Federal guidelines recommend several practices for cooling food, but not all restaurants follow them. Food safety programs and restaurants can improve cooling practices by

• Focusing intervention efforts on independent and smaller restaurants.
• Following the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Food Code cooling guidelines.
• Encouraging or requiring kitchen managers to be certified in food safety.

EHS-Net looked at food cooling practices in restaurants and published three articles on these practices.

• How cooling practices like cooling food depth, pan ventilation, and time and temperature monitoring are linked to how fast food cools.
• How restaurant and kitchen manager traits linked with use of methods that help cool food quickly.
• How restaurants cool food and whether they follow FDA advice.

• Common gaps in restaurant cooling practices include failure to use methods that help food cool quickly. These gaps include
  • Not monitoring the temperature of cooling food. One in 7 restaurants stored foods in refrigerators above 41°F.
  • Storing cooling food in containers deeper than 3 inches. Four in 10 restaurants placed hot foods in these kinds of containers.
  • Not ventilating cooling food. One in 4 restaurants did not loosely cover cooling food to ventilate and protect it from contamination.
• Restaurants with certified kitchen managers and that were chain-owned were more likely to use methods that help food cool quickly.