Investigating The Effect of Food Safety Practices on Hotels Performance: Drivers, ‎Perceived Benefits and Challenges

Abstract

The increasing number of food poisoning outbreaks and food-related scares has led to calls for better food safety practices. Food poisoning outbreaks of salmonella, listeria, and E-coli have made the public more skeptical of the food they consume and the effect on the hotel performance. The purpose of this paper is to identify drivers, benefits, and challenges coming out of food safety practices and the effect of these practices on hotel performance in four and five-star hotels in Luxor and Aswan. For this purpose, the questionnaires were designed to gather all the necessary information related to food and beverage mangers during food safety practices, understand the Drivers, perceived benefits, and challenges of food safety practices in the selected hotels (17 hotels). The total number of participants was 68 of top management in the food and beverage department in the selected hotels. Findings show that although there are some crucial difficulties that seem to be quite difficult for hotels, benefits derived from it are greater and let the hotels fulfill the legal or market requirements. The major benefits and challenges of food safety practices were associated with financial, infrastructural, and people related issues. It is obvious that most of the difficulties are more directly or indirectly related to costs involved with the food safety practices that could not be recouped in the short term. However, these costs and investments should be seen in the long term as the return of the investment by for example decrease of contaminated food products, improvement in the area of food safety and quality, increase in reliability, and fewer complaints from consumers as well as reduction of operational costs.