Maintaining food safety—always a top priority for hotel restaurants. The best prepared-andpresented food is unnoticed if diners get sick or employees are injured. Here are some new products to assist you in this ongoing challenge.

Protective Gloves
DayMark Safety Systems of Bowling Green, Ohio, primarily makes food safety labels, but, says Jaime Brannan, account executive with Benghiat Marketing which represents DayMark, “The real big news for 2006 is personal safety products.” DayMark is offering 50 new products including a full line of protective gloves.

The company’s HexArmor glove incorporates ceramic plates in a light and flexible design that promises to enhance compliance by actually being wearable. The glove particularly protects the thumb, index, and middle fingers, proven to be the digits most likely to be injured. “Depending on the type of glove you get it can protect you from more than just knife cuts but severe punctures,” says Brannan.

Additionally, DayMark’s watertight silicone Steam Gloves protect hands from temperatures of up to 225° F.

Premoistened Wipes
Nice-Pak Products, Inc. of Orangeburg, New York, which manufactures premoistened wipes, just introduced disposable SaniSurface Table Cleaning Wipes for cleaning tables. The wipes are meant to replace the cotton towels that typically are used from table to table and which often end up transferring food and debris between tables rather than cleaning them.

“Restaurateurs owe it to their customers to seat them at tables as fresh as the food served,” says Product Manager John Lupisello. SaniSurface, a single-use product, “is going to ensure that tables are not contaminated by the multi-use towel.” SaniSurface is also available in hip packs to make its use more convenient.

Sanitizing Product
Ecolab’s Oasis 146 Multi-Quat Sanitizer, a no-rinse food contact hard-surface sanitizing product, is a new product that makes sanitation compliance easier to achieve due to its expanded useconcentration range.

“This one has an effective range that’s really quite wide for a sanitizer,” says Bruce Cords PhD, VP environment, food safety, and public health with the St. Paul, Minnesotabased company. Oasis 146 kills 99.999 percent of foodborne organisms such as E. coli and Salmonella sp. It is color-coded, making it instantly recognizable to employees and helping assure they select the right product for the job. Oasis 146 recently won the 2005 North American Foodservice Grand Prix Award in the cleaning and chemical product category.

Cooling Monitor
Not keeping food at the proper temperature can breed bacteria and lead to food poisoning—every food operator’s nightmare. To better comply with FDA HACCP guidelines, which require that food be cooled to 400 F or lower in less than four hours after cooking or hot holding, Cooper- Atkins Corporation of Middlefield, Connecticut, a manufacturer of time, temperature, and humidity instruments, has come up with the Coolit-Rite TTM41 cooling monitor. Its built-in programmable timer tracks elapsed time while its thermometer monitors food temperature. A 70 decibel alarm sounds when the food temperature drops below 410 F or time expires. Coolit-Rite has a temperature range of –4 to 3020 F and an accuracy of +/- 2 percent.

Kimberly Markey, marketing manager of Cooper- Atkins, says the thermometer’s programmable timer holds the final data for proof of HACCP compliance.

Tough Gloves
FoodHandler, a full-line provider of gloves and safe food handling products and programs for the foodservice industry, has recently introduced its FormFlex™ Nitrile Gloves.

FormFlex™ Nitrile Gloves are “specifically designed to resist breakdown by animal fats,” according to company spokesperson Keith Borkowski. “They are tough, durable, formfitting gloves that offer exceptional dexterity—perfect for prepping raw meat, poultry and shellfish.” Additionally, Borkowski says FormFlex™ Nitrile Gloves will “last longer and require fewer changes than other formfitting gloves therefore saving hoteliers time and money while helping prevent foodborne illness.”

Labeling System
Foodservice operators that label food in order to track received on, prepare by, and discard by dates can simplify those date-coding procedures with the new DualFlex™ labeling system from FreshMarx of Miamisburg, Ohio.

Rich Masartis, FreshMarx’s senior director of marketing, says, “What we’re trying to do, in addition to providing food safety, is improve productivity and efficiency, minimize food waste, and reduce supply cost. We know food safety is critical, but we also want to deliver other benefits to operators.”

Designed to be used in tandem with the FreshMarx Monarch® 1152™ handheld labeler, the DualFlex system features seven label rolls, each preprinted and color-coded with a day of the week. Operators start each day by loading the appropriate roll into the 1152. Then, depending on the food being labeled, they simply dial in the “use-by” or “discard” date to coincide with the food’s rotation period.