I worked in the prepared foods section of a high end grocery store. You likely have one of the stores in your area if you live within an hour and half of a city. The stores are quite expensive but consumers are willing to pay for the "quality." Their extensive hot and cold bars were a big reason why people went to the store. These are essentially buffets where you put your choices in a cardboard box and they are weighed at checkout..
I'm sure I've written about this before but it bears repeating. For the "homemade soups", we dumped huge plastic bags of the stuff into the metal soup containers in front of the deli area. Disgusting. The leftover soup at the end of the day got mixed into the next day's soup. The soup in the warmers were often several days of leftovers. In the kitchen where the prepared foods were made, we had a team of about 15 people. Ninety percent of them used the prep time to eat the popcorn shrimp, chicken wings, barbecue etc as if the foods were their personal snack station. This was using their bare hands. I never bought another item at the hot bar again when I saw workers licking their fingers and continuing to prep out back. This was not a situation of what I thought workers were doing. I was there watching it.
This tip is something some people may not be aware of. We had an extensive series of glass cases that would hold things such as the famous cranberry tuna fish, potato salads and the like. At the close of the store, we would pack those up in containers. In the morning the fresh items went in trays to the front of the glass cases. The older product would be closest the worker who was serving customers so you got rid of the day or two(or more) old items first. It was the same with meat and seafood.
Now when I go a store for fresh fish, I tell them I won't be cooking the fish for 2 days(not true) and could they give me their freshest pieces. Almost always they will go in the back and bring out the tub with that day's deliveries. The same with meats, especially ground meats. Also be aware that even though we were supposed to date the deli meats for slicing, a fair amount of workers never did. Hot tip on this- if you order a sliced deli meat that is not very popular, it may be significantly past its
best buy date. For instance, I love rosemary ham but never order it because I know it has likely been sitting in the back of the meat fridge for who knows how long.
I will never eat in any buffets after watching customers stick their bare hands into items and pull out pieces to taste the foods. People coughed and sneezed and who knows if they even washed after using our bathrooms. I think people need to decide if it's worth the risk of possibly get an ecoli or norovirus infection when eating from a buffet. You just have no idea of what goes on behind the scenes. I won't even get into the every hour temp checks that were required but not adhered to.
Sorry to temporarily spoil your holiday appetite but I figured that a sanitation report might be helpful to those considering buffets or prepared foods.
-Edited for spelling
