To ask the most shocking things you’ve seen in the food industry

[MrsA2015]

If you’ve a background or currently in the food sector, what secrets and practices do you see? My dad used to work for Pizza Hut many years back and refused to eat from there anymore because of the things he’d seen. Even though I’ve pointed out you can access food hygiene ratings for most restaurants now!

DSiL has a part time job in McDonald's says he would never have a mcflurry because you can't tell when the machine has been cleaned

There will always be exceptions like goose has shown but when I worked in McDonald’s (and have friends still there that say it hasn’t changed) it was super clean. I was actually shocked when I started working there thinking it would be great to doss around a bit but it was actual hard work!

At a hotel I worked at the chefs would regularly go on cockroach hunts, gather them in ice cream tubs and microwave them to kill them. The head chef was a very sweaty man indeed and used to drip onto the food if he was on the meat section.

I worked in a grocery store, my shocking thing is not food hygiene related, but shocking nonetheless.

I was astonished at the sheer amount of waste. Kilos of bulk items thrown away because once a customer removes it from the bin, it cannot be sold. Damaged food, cold products discarded on shelves by lazy customers who have changed their minds... All binned.

Made me sick to think of the waste.

That’s the thing about chain restaurants, people expect the same cleaning standards across all of the branches but forget its still managed by individuals who have a lot to say regarding staff practice. I knew two sisters who worked in different McDonald’s branches and each told me completely different things.

TGI Fridays

Nobody can be trusted

I've worked in a lot of pubs and restaurants, without a doubt the most common, disgusting practice across the board is using dirty cloths/sponges/mops to clean kitchens.

I'm a bit odd about those things (new dish sponge every day), but pretty much without fail, there's a black, greasy, oily mop in every kitchen around. I even know when a place has been cleaned with dirty cloths/mops now, it has its own smell.

"Bar staff picking up empty glasses with the their fingers in the top- massive no no."
Why?

I used to work in an Italian restaurant in the north east, where the standards were high and driven by the owner. He was a good employer too, used to try to get people as many shifts as they needed so if we were quiet he'd often have a couple of the waiters scrubbing out the inside of the fridge.
If you ever had to work on Christmas day you were sent home as soon as the final table had their main courses and he and his gf were back to next day to clean the place up.
I used to naively think all restaurants were like that.

I'm not easily shocked at all but that gammon story is just 😯😮

I worked in a factory one summer. I was on the mince pie production line. They made the M&S luxury mince pies.
We had to pick up the cooked ones and put them in the plastic trays. No gloves. At the end of the shift our finger nails were full of mince pie, so our nails had been in the mince pies.
One girl didn't like working there, so didn't wash her hands after going to the loo.
No-one enforced the hair net and hats properly, so lots of loose hair dangling over food.
Same with jewellry, not enforeced, so potential earrings, beads, diamonds dropping into food.

M&S always gave notice of inspections. On that day all the rules were rigorously enforced, and people were offered overtime to come in early and do extra cleaning so it all looked spotless.

@stealth

Bar staff picking up glasses by putting the fingers on the top- then dump them at the end of bar and then go straight into serving someone after handling the inside of a glass that’s had drink in and people drinking out of without washing their hands. It’s a really dated horrible practice.
It’s also really dangerous- a great way to cut your fingers! Glasses bang together/get heavy/slip. Should always use a tray.

Ok. I tend to wash my hands loads. and my glasses never sliooed :o

Outwardly fancy, expensive restaurant that the owner refused to wash his hands but was very "hands on" with the work. He'd use the loo through a door at the back of the kitchen (he wouldn't close the door so staff could see his back as he pissed!!!) then wouldn't wash his hands. There wasn't a chiller behind the bar, he just filled the sinks with ice and kept house wines in there (only wines available. Cheap shit he pretended was expensive). If they weren't cold enough yet he would pour wine into an ice filled glass and pour the now cold wine into another glass using his dirty hands as a sieve. He would also go mad at me when I used a glass in the ice bucket to put ice in drinks. He told me I had to use my hands to save time.

I was so grossed out by his non-washing of hands that I subconsciously washed mine too much and they became sore and irritated.

In the evening after a massive, crazy busy nights the staff would go out for an Indian. All well and good except he's smash up all the popadoms with his dirty fucking hands like he was doing us a favour making them bite sized. Then he'd touch the food trying to dish it out!!!!

Boak!

As a student nurse I once looked after a young lad who went into kidney failure following E. coli infection from eating a contaminated McDonalds burger.

Family seafood restaurant. It served whole flounder, and each had to be checked for maggots.

Customer came in who was known to the chef, and had clearly pissed him off. Chef went into the skip and dug out some of the discarded flounder, picked out some maggots and put them into customer's white sauce.

It was actually a nice place though, and I never saw anything else even remotely as awful as that in three years.

Someone I know worked in a family run hotel, she was instructed to rinse the veg left on peoples plates so it could be be dished up again.

I briefly worked in Pizza Hut, one woman came in every week and she moaned about everything. The staff used to take turns spitting in her coffee and on her chocolate cake. The shift manager took his/her turn.

Vegetable Oil is full of mashed-up slugs.

Friend worked in a place where they made vegetable oil.
The slugs were very often left on the conveyor belt and ended up getting processed along with the oil!

Her advice is to go for Sunflower oil. Never buy vegetable oil.

(unless you don't mind a bit of protein)

I spent a few days working in a very small food factory. I was in the toilets and the production director (who was very "hands on" with the food processing as they had few staff) walked straight out of a cubicle, out of the toilet and back onto the shop floor without washing her hands! If that wasn't bad enough, she was the designated H&S/Food Hygiene officer!

I so wished I hadn't watched that clip.

Husbands company does a lot of work in food factories. the M&s ones are the most careful with food hygiene. The worst are a very famous pork pie manufacturer, a mr, who makes cakes and the company who make curries for asda/morrisons deli type counters/ ready meals. Who regularly had areas of their factory tested positive for botulism. 🤢🤢

I worked in a butchers (a well know chain back in the early 90's). Apart from the groping behind the very narrow counter, the master butcher once dropped a ring of saussages on the floor, dunked them in the bucket of water I had just mopped the floor with and put them in the display cabinet. He sold them later that day and I had never been so happy to be vegetarian as I was that day.

I know, working in a butchers when you're veggie makes little sense but needs must when youre at Uni and need funds.

That clip! I thought she was going to gob on it, which was bad enough.
But BLOODY HELL!
That's bloody disgusting. She should be locked away, for life.

Fray Bentos pies are disgusting-the pipework the gravy is pumped through is full of mould.
Coleslaw factories-the people working in them don't get paid a lot so they don't care about hand hygiene...I saw people taking scoops of coleslaw out of the pots before the label was stuck on and eating it.
Apples-organic apples come out of the same box as the non organic apples.....same with other fruit and veg.....it's a load of bullshit to entice people into paying more. In the same vein the veg packaged as "finest" is the same as the basics stuff-they just pick the prettier looking ones out for the finest packaging.
Welcome Break (motorway services) specifically Hopwood Park used to encourage us to serve out of date food rather than 'waste' it.
Subway relabels it's food when it's gone out of date to give it a longer shelf life.

All these are from personal experience.

never eating again

I too worked in a big named supermarket once. I will never to this day will buy anything that’s made instore.

Might be a while before I eat out again after this thread...

I won’t buy prepacked sandwiches that have been shipped in to supermarkets either after reading about students in summer jobs having wanking competitions into them. Nope nope nope.