Food Hygiene specialist adds to training programme

The current pandemic has led Christeyns Food Hygiene, based in Warrington, to reassess its training programmes for customers in the food, beverage and dairy industries to assist them in meeting recent staffing challenges.

With restaurants closing and a soaring rise in demand for domestic food products, many food manufacturers have needed to take on additional staff and with that came a requirement for basic food hygiene and health and safety training that could be delivered quickly and safely.

“The quickest way to do this is via e-learning,” states Elaine Hankinson of CFH.  “We realised that our customers needed to be able to pick and choose exactly the right courses and access them with immediate effect.  We are now working with an e-learning partner to offer over a 100 different course titles.”

Courses such as Food Safety and Hygiene, Hand Hygiene, Cleaning in the Food Industry, Managing Disinfection and Hygiene, HACCP and Health and Safety for Food Workers have been the most popular and are easily managed via e-learning.

According to information produced by elearningindustry.com, e-learning enables students to learn five times more material for every hour of training.

Many food manufacturers have also taken this time to review their workforce talent and have chosen to upskill some employees with more technical and detailed training courses. CFH has found that the best delivery method for this type of training is using a virtual classroom with an online tutor.  This provides both a safe and cost effective option for more detailed coursework.

“Despite the current COVID-19 lockdown it is still important that we invest in training and developing our colleagues” commented Liz Shaw, Quality Systems Manager at First Milk.  “Christeyns Food Hygiene delivered HACCP training quickly and efficiently, with e-learning for our production team and via Microsoft Teams for the management group.”

According to Statista.com, 58% of British 16-24year-olds were using online learning materials in 2019, but only 29% in the 35-44 age bracket. Over the past few months, people of all ages and across all business sectors have become more comfortable in using technology and embraced various platforms of online communication, to hold meetings, to carry out their normal day to day work, which will encourage increased usage of learning online.

Going forward CFH will be planning more training courses to be delivered remotely, as businesses come out of lockdown this way of delivering training may well become the norm.  It allows delegates from all over the UK access to the same courses and the option for tutor led or self-learning on a choice of modules.

“Having discussed specific needs and training challenges with our customers, we have adapted our whole training package to offer a very comprehensive catalogue of food manufacturing related e-learning courseware and virtual training, with the aim of not only helping our customers to train individual employees, but to create a food safety culture.”

Christeyns Food Hygiene also holds hygiene webinars, available to anyone who needs more advice on hygiene in the workplace.