WOODY'S HOTEL

After the occurrence of the food poisoning in our hotel, we were fast to take some immediate actions. We immediately made a social media post to inform guests about incident and publicly apologize (see links). We also reassured everyone that something like this won’t happen again and that further actions would be taken to achieve that. We closed the kitchen immediately after the incident and gave a press conference to inform the general public about the issue and what actions we would take immediately and to prevent such an incident from happening again. We uploaded the full video of the press conference on Facebook, in which our HRM manager Silke Dekker gave a statement. In the statement, we made clear that we were very sorry about the incident and that we would make sure that the two guests hospitalized would be provided with the best medical care possible. Further immediate actions we took included hiring an inspection service to find out where the food poisoning came from, as well as hiring a catering company and an ice cream stand, to make sure we provided our guests with food. The catering company we chose was Sodexo, which is one of the biggest catering services in Holland. We chose to hire them because of their high effort to be as sustainable as possible and their mission is to better the quality of life for everyone, which matches with what we stand for as a hotel. They also have a certificate called ‘Gouden Bedrijfs Restaurant’(the golden companies restaurant) stands for high quality. We offered dinner for our guests for free as an apology offering and we also offered free ice cream for the children, to calm and comfort them during this turbulent time and to keep the environment of our hotel kids friendly. Moreover, we informed all our guests that were in the hotel during the incident and that planned to visit within two weeks after that, to be transparent and honest, which our customers really value. 

 

The inspection service we hired was the Dutch food safety authority. They did a thorough investigation in our kitchen and found that the food poisoning came from expired meat provided by one of our suppliers.

 

For the future, to make sure that something like this won’t happen again, we terminated all contracts with the food supplier that provided us with the expired meat, which we also announced to the public. We then hired a new supplier of quality meat, with an ISO 22000 certificate, which is the international standard for food safety management systems. Furthermore, we made sure that the hospitalized guests were taken good care of during their process of recovery and our management team visited them to again apologize and to gift them with a voucher each, for a weekend stay at our hotel for two persons as an apology offering. We also took a thorough look at all other food suppliers we are working with, to make sure that their hygiene is up to standards and that they only offered produce with exceptional quality. Moreover, we made sure that all of our kitchen staff members obtain the HACCP hygiene certificate, to assure maximum hygiene in our kitchen, for preventive reasons. We are also planning to make more promotions on social media for our kitchen, to make sure that we attract more guests and provide them with a good experience, so that they will recommend us through word of mouth. With the training we provided to our chefs last year, they are now inspired and create more new and interesting dishes that will speak for themselves and attract more guests. Moreover, for the next year, we are planning to invest in turning our recent kitchen into an open kitchen, so that our guests are able to observe what our chefs are doing and there is more transparency. This is also an interesting experience for our guests, especially the children, to watch the making of their food. 

 

From now on, Woody’s Hotel highly prioritizes hygiene and safety regarding food and we are guaranteeing our guests that our food is safe to eat and delicious. We again made sure to announce that to the public.