Restaurant Employees’ Food Handling Practices in Irbid City, Jordan

Abstract

It has been established that food handlers working in foodservices are the main source of food borne outbreaks. The current study objective is to assess restaurant employees' food handling practices by exploring driving forces behind these practices. The study was accomplished quantitatively covering 245 restaurant employees in Irbid city-Jordan; who provided primary data by completing a designated self-administered questionnaire. A model of nine hypotheses was developed and examined using independent-samples t-tests and one way ANOVA tests. Study's findings revealed a large number of variables influencing restaurant employees' food handling practices including socio-demographic measures (such as age & education), workrelated elements (such as restaurant size & HACCP implementation) and culture. This study explores a previously confined researched field -cultural influences on restaurant employees' food handling practices contributing to a wider understanding of safe food handling which in turn should enhance food safety levels. It fructifies many recommendations embodying its findings' implications to enhance food safety levels; these include advocating HACCP implementation and more control on non-Jordanian restaurant employees' food safety competences.

Food Safety Knowledge among Food Handlers in Hospitals of Jordan

“…The findings from the current study were further supported by a previous study in Jordan where FHs were found to be having a "very poor" to "good" knowledge in food handling operations [27]. Improved knowledge in addition to practices in this area has been associated with food handling training [17,21]. These findings emphasize the necessity of training of FHs in this regard.…”

“…Literature indicated that the reason why only a minority of hospital FHs attended a FS training course maybe attributed to underestimation of the importance of the FS, lack of hospitals' administrative support and commitment to involve them in the FS training sessions [50,51]. In line with most of the reported conclusions about the importance of FS training [17,52], findings from the current study supported the premise of this importance. The lack of FS training has been reported to be a reason behind an inadequate FSK, which, in turn, can result in unsafe food handling practices [53,54].…”

“…Many studies have been conducted in Jordan investigated Food Safety Knowledge (FSK) among foodservices staff, in restaurants [15], universities foodservices [16], food handling practices among foodservices' employees in Irbid City [17], studies investigating FHs knowledge relevant to FS in Jordanian hospitals were scarce. The aim of this study was to evaluate the FSK of hospitals' FHs in Jordan.…”

Prevalence of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus Among Food Handlers in Duhok City

“…A similar result was obtained by Simsek et al, (2009) who found that (299) food handlers in Sanliurfa, in South-eastern Anatolia are males because the majority of women in Southern Anatolia are unemployed. Habiballah et al, (2017) found that majority of workers (81.6%), who are working in tourist restaurants in Irbid, Jordan were males; they found that females are not eager to work in restaurants (Kasturwar and Shafee 2011). Other studies revealed that their samples are mixed near to equal percentages (Kasturwar and Shafee 2011;El-Shenawy et al, 2014;Castro et al, 2016).…”

Use of the Health Belief Model (HBM) to Examine Food Handlers' Practices in Five Stars Hotels at Petra City, Jordan

“…Furthermore, most of them were carried out on households' food handling practices. In Jordan, in spite there were some studies that investigated food handlers' practices including Osaili et al (2011), Sharif et al (2013), Osaili et al (2013), Habiballah et al (2017) and Habiballah et al (2018), they were focusing on the demographics and/or knowledge and attitudes of food handlers. Accordingly, it can be seen clearly that there is a gap in applying the HBM on professional food handling practices.…”