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!

Sometimes a bit of ignorance is bliss

🤢

Having watched Gordon Ramsey's show and read stuff like this before, I think that almost nothing would shock me. Disgust, yes. Shock, no.

Maybe if I found out the meat a restaurant was serving was baby, that might shock me. But knowing how horrible people can be, I'm sure that's happened.

Well known frozen pizza manufacturers who my aunt won't tell me the name of as I'd never eat them again used to walk through the factory floor and see people she hadn't hired. It turned out worker's cousins and brothers were doing their shifts as the workers themselves were out doing taxi runs. Apparently they figured as long as someone was working it didn't matter who it was, despite the fact that all official workers had to go through hygiene and food handling courses.
One day she walked past a lady who was licking her thumb to separate the pre cut pepperoni pieces from the sausage to put them on the pizzas. She didn't realise that licking your fingers to handle people's food was a bad thing. It was so hard to get her to understand that they got a colleague to tell her to go home and not to return. They had to bin an entire shift's worth of pepperoni pizza.

Egg being scooped up off the floor and put into buckets mixed with flies and hen poo.
Ok, it's then pasteurized but this is what goes into a lot of our food.
They don't break eggs to produce much of what we eat that contains egg.

I worked at a restaurant once, a woman found a hair in her ham and cheese panini. The chef pulled it out, and sprinkled some extra cheese in before re grilling and sending back out.

Also seen burgers picked up off the floor and put back onto a grill.

I worked in a very fancy Chinese restaurant (in uk) when I was 16 and the kitchen staff slept on a mattress in a tiny room just off the kitchen. We had fly larve everywhere, the raw chicken was stacked in soggy cardboard boxes and we had to scrape the uneaten food off the plates back into the pots to be served to the next customers.
My boss was so scary I didn't even bother going back to collect my last paycheck.
I have worked for years in restaurants in NY too and you get very good at hiding your surprise when mice run along the back of the booths while customers are ordering. Once a big rat fell off a ceiling beam right into the middle of the restaurant. The kitchen porter smashed it to bits with a baseball bat after he'd chased it down to the basement. We had a really big rat problem as we were only a few blocks north of Chinatown and the rubbish was left out all night. There were so many rats it looked like the bins were moving on their own.

I know someone who used to work in a resteraunt when they ran out of the fresh soup they made they would go and get smart price tinned soup and still charge the £6-9.00. another person was a cleaner they used your dirty bath towels to clean your dishes in your room for the next people.

Hygiene ratings are rubbish
One place I worked food wise was spot on but the building was so old and we'd be marked down for stuff like a cracked tile

I used to work for one of the big 4 on the deli counter. I would never, ever buy meat or fish off a supermarket counter again.

Stuff left without lids on for hours, sauces left out of the fridges all day and used for customer orders, cages with fresh meat/fish/dairy left on the shop floor for hours (max should be 20 minutes), people not washing their hands or wearing hairnets, people handling raw fish, rinsing their hands in cold water, then going on to handle raw or cooked meat, or pizzas. It was grim.

We always passed our hygiene inspections because we got warning they were coming (they'd work round the area, so other stores would ring ahead and warn us) - but on a day-to-day basis, it was truly horrible. Management didn't give a shit, either.

Make your own food from scratch with things locally sourced and home grown please.

I worked in many many different places that handles food, from corner cafes to high end restaurants and I can assure you that what you see is definitely not what you get.

Hygiene visits are pre planned - every place I worked was only cleaned properly on that visit
Vegan/vegetarian food will most of the time contain some sort of meat or animal produce
People don’t wash their hands nearly as much as they should
Food is dropped and picked up and placed into your food ALOT
Things are mixed up and re used when they should have been in the bin
Nothing is ever really ‘sanitised’ e.g plates, cutlery, glasses ect.
At least one chef is ill I guarantee - and they’re coughing and sneezing all over the place, but you can’t see it because they’re in the back
All of your food is cheap shit. I don’t care if you’re paying £57 for a dish, it is all cheap crap.
Just don’t eat out, it’s grimey and disgusting

Chicken factory summer job...the fact that the same chicken is put in marks and spencer packages to iceland, tesco, idll or sainsburys etc. Morrisons was never packed in this factory. Reason why we buy idll chicken now!

"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."

Isn't that illegal?

I used to work in a pub, the chef dipped his balls in someone's custard once - I saw him do it, took the pudding out (to his friend) and told him not to eat it as chef had contaminated it with his bollocks. Went to take it away, friend laughed raucously and ate it anyway .
Worked in a cafe with a 5 star hygiene rating as a teen, the girls making up the sandwiches would smoke on their breaks, stub their fags out on the floor of the alley (which ran between the aforementioned pub and this cafe), and go straight back in to making up sandwiches without washing their hands. They were very lazy about making sure things were only in the counter for a certain amount of time, leaving the same stuff out for days.
Why oh why anyone thinks checking the hygiene rating means fuck all is beyond me.
I do still eat out, it doesn't mean I sit and worry that I can never go anywhere!

God this is awful.

What i dont get is - is nobody worried that they might make people sick and end up either getting a horrible reputation, shut down, sued or at worst killing someone?

I used to work in a laboratory that environmental health would send samples to, so we could work out if something had been cooked during manufacture or added later to claim compensation. Think mice, various insects etc. More often than not they were genuine claims and these things had got in during manufacture.

It was very hard to eat or drink anything whilst working there.

We used to dread opening up the samples every day, as you just never knew what was going to be in it.

People don't worry because the likelihood is, it won't be traced back to them. The hygiene training in your average supermarket is practically non-existent. I used to cook chickens etc. on the deli counter - I got practically no training. The sanitiser for the dishes never worked, we often had no hot water, the glass doors in the hot cabinet for the chickens smashed and was replaced by plastic that didn't trap the heat, so the cooked chickens were never kept at the right temperatures.

The temperature checks were often falsified - in fact, someone got fired when I was there for serving bloody chicken to a customer. He hadn't temperature checked when he took it out of the oven and wrote a fake temperature on the checksheets. The customer took it home, cut it open and it was running blood. Thank God nobody got sick.

Lots of the ovens were broken and/or dodgy. We were told to use them anyway, otherwise the food had to be binned and they lost money. Pizzas sat out for hours (not in fridges, on racks) and were served to customers anyway. Sometimes they were left out overnight at room temperature.

We passed every single hygiene test with flying colours.

Wow that's crazy.

For some reason i feel like i should cook entirely from scratch for the rest of my life (not envy!)

I worked for a well known pub chain. One of the chefs used to just piss in the kitchen sink when he couldn't be bothered to go to the toilet.

This thread is making me never want to eat again.

As a student, I did shift work at a bakery. One evening, a woman brought back a loaf that had a mouse through it like a scotch egg. SHE apologised and asked if we would please give her another loaf in exchange. Imagine what a kerfuffle there would be these days?

At a very popular branch of subway: omelettes with black mould spots served, chicken not defrosted given a quick 30 second microwave and put in sandwiches, water not changed when washing the bread trays to the point it was gray with bits floating

At a premiership football stadium; the tables in the boxes and conference rooms are all wiped down using the toilet cloth...a toilet cloth that gets changed about once a year at best.

DH worked in a couple of food factories as a temp. He wouldn't eat supermarket cakes for years. Maggots were found under some equipment, stuff dropped on the floor then just picked up and used anyway. Place was closed down not long after he left on health & safety grounds.

Gross!! My immune system must be robust as I eat out a fair amount. I’m never going to eat a coleslaw side again!!!
As for the fucking a gammon - I have no words.