Kitchen staff's perception towards food safety practices in luxury hotels : a case study of Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

This study examines food safety knowledge, attitudes and practice in kitchen staffs of luxury hotels to investigate the existent relationships among the three factors and identify the gap that causes the lack of food safety practice in luxury hotels' restaurants in Bangkok, Thailand. The author administered a questionnaire survey with 400 kitchen staffs recruited from 8 selected premises to evaluate their food safety knowledge, attitude and practices. Descriptive statistic, One-Way ANOVA and Pearson's Correlation were used to analyze the data. A total of 292 valid samples were screened and used in the analysis The result discovered positive correlations among the factors, revealed that attitude had a bigger impact on improving food safety practice and displayed the strongest correlation between food safety attitude and practice (r=.687, n=292, p<.001), while relationships between knowledge and practice, knowledge and attitude both showed medium correlations (r=.432, n=292, p<.001), (r=0.442, n=292, p<.001), respectively. Furthermore, this research also identified the problems within the sample groups including topics that need to be adjusted or improved for future training which would assist practitioners to develop strategies, improve the level of compliance of kitchen staffs to food safety code and provide a better quality, benefiting the hotel industry.