Grant promotes food safety training research

Researchers work to find participants with Missouri Restaurant Association.

By Ryan Martin

Published Sept. 28, 2007

MU researchers have been awarded a $598,914 grant to improve food safety training programs for Hispanic workers in the food industry.

The researchers' goals are to increase the knowledge, behavior and attitude of food safety, which is defined as proper food handling, temperature control and food service practices for food preparing, cooking, serving, cooling and reheating.

The Columbia/Boone County Health Department offers Spanish-speaking versions of their training videos in their food handler classes and have Spanish-speaking versions oriented for managers.

"We're trying to effectively reach out to the Spanish-speaking community," Environmental Health Manager Gerald Worley said.

Program Director of Research Seonghee Cho said the training programs need to incorporate more visual learning and group interaction.

The researchers — two professors from the department of hotel and restaurant management and one professor from the department of educational, school and counseling psychology — began the three-year project, which will finish in September 2010.

The first two years of the program will be spent collecting data for the research.

By the third year, researchers will develop a program to evaluate the participants' knowledge and attitude of food safety.

The program will include a number of surveys for the participants, their managers and their coworkers. These surveys will gauge the participants' knowledge of and attitude toward food safety compared to the level before the research.

The researchers are working with the Missouri Restaurant Association to find research participants.

The association identifies potential restaurants for the researchers, who then contact the workers with the help of the general managers of those restaurants.

The association is focusing on the St. Louis and Kansas City areas because of the high population of Hispanic restaurant workers.

They are not working with any local restaurants but would welcome the participation, Cho said.

The research is a collaborative study with two parts, Cho said. The researchers will work alongside the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, which is a subcontractor for the research.

Hotel management assistant professor Mehmet Erdem is the primary investigator at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He is working with MU researchers to collect data for the research.

The grant was part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's nationwide distribution of more than $14 million in food safety grants, according to a Sept. 24 USDA news release. The grants were awarded to 17 universities across the United States.