Despite his many COO responsibilities at Apple-Metro, a 30-unit Applebee’s franchisee in Harrison, N.Y., Miguel Fernandez appears to be mellow guy—until you mention food poisoning.
“If you ask me to tell you the one thing that keeps me up at night, that’s the one,” said Fernandez, who took the top operating post with the franchise group 10 months ago. Prior to that, he was senior vice president over Applebee’s International. “All the other things I have to worry about, they don’t bother me like that. I hate to think about making someone sick.”
So instead, he thinks about doing all he can to avoid the problem, which means drilling staff relentlessly on sanitation procedures. Like a real-life Orwellian story, signs are posted everywhere reminding staffers of proper procedures, and inspectors are hired to secretly monitor whether they’re following orders.
“If you don’t wash your hands once every three-and-a-half minutes, that’s a violation,” said Fernandez. “Every associate, every manager, everybody washes their hands that often.”
Should one think that a bit obsessive, Fernandez starts listing myriad occasions for spreading germs, even by front-of-the-house staff.
“Think about how servers pick up plates at the table and then drop them off at the dishwasher,” he began. “He’s now had (microbial) contact with the food and with the customer. If he doesn’t wash his hands and picks up a clean plate, he’s now spreading that. Applebee’s rules say he cannot leave kitchen without washing his hands.”
At hotline stations, all cooks have two sets of tongs—one for raw product, one for cooked product—and food temperatures are monitored with hospital-standard regularity.
And just to ensure everyone’s on their toes, private audits are conducted two to three times per quarter—on top of regular health board inspections.
“Health department audits are good, but Applebee’s standards are much tougher,” he said. At a cost of $300 per audit per restaurant, Apple-Metro spends as much as $108,000 a year to ensure its sanitation is up to standard. “But that’s nothing compared to the potential downside of getting somebody sick. It’s worth the investment to us to be confident we won’t do that.”