EcoSure

Today, EcoSure visited my store. Burger King has been using EcoSure as a measurement of how well we are doing on our Clean & Safe Platform. They have a list of 12 Criticals, each of which contain several checks. In most stores they are viewed as tyrants who keep searching until they find something, no matter how small.

At one store I was in, we were checking to be sure all the handwashing sinks were stocked. We got to the third sink and a crewmember had just washed their hands, using the last squirt of soap. Because the dispenser was empty at the time our inspector got to the sink, we got a critical. One critical and you fail. Period. It does not matter if the crewmember was getting another box to fill the dispenser. In the world of EcoSure, there is no leeway, no common sense to say “ok, this just happened, let’s see how it is handled to see if it is corrected.” Each item is taken entirely by itself, as if anything in the restaurant world is an entity of it’s own not effected by anything around it. At that time, I was one of thousands of general managers thinking….why do we need EcoSure? They intimidate people to get the result we all want, a cleaner safer place for our guests to dine.

Now, three years later, when my First Assistant called to say we had gotten 2 criticals, I was not in tears as I was at the previous store. Burger King has an 8-step process of handwashing. Leave one step out, it is a critical. A crewmember was washing her hands and didn’t use the nail brush. My First Assistant corrected her at the sink and she repeated the process, correctly. This is called Teach & Coach, another BK Platform. Our inspector counted it a critical because it wasn’t done correctly at the beginning. Our other critical is that a non-critical on our last Health Dept. visit was not corrected in 10 days. The TN Health Dept. gives us 30 days to correct non-criticals, but EcoSure doesn’t. So because the shelves we had ordered have not come in yet, we suffer the consequences.

My management team and crew made me extremely proud today in that the only thing we could control was the nail brush, and it was corrected instantly with the Teach & Coach method. Yes, we will wear the “failure” for 12 months before receiving another visit. We will also know that we followed prodecure on the other 11 things and did what was right when one thing was left out. I say AWESOME JOB!