Association launches National Food Safety Month

The National Restaurant Association is putting food safety front and center this fall with the launch of "A Recipe for Food Safety Success," its 2026 National Food Safety Month campaign. The 5-week initiative is designed to help operators strengthen everyday food safety best practices.

Throughout September, the Association will roll out food safety bundles focused on the essential ingredients needed to create a successful food safety program. The resources, featuring recipe card checklists, shift meeting briefs, weekly quizzes, and posters, are designed to make employee education and engagement easier. The goal: Give employees practical and easy-to-use tools that reinforce food safety expectations and help turn best practices into consistent, daily habits.

The National Restaurant Association launched National Food Safety Month in 1994 as a way of raising awareness of food safety education and training across the restaurant industry. Since then, the program has featured a new theme each year, along with tools and training resources through the Association’s ServSafe training and certification program.

Five ingredients for food safety success

The 5-week campaign will focus on a different area of food safety each week:

• Week 1: Building a strong food safety culture. Operators can assess their current food safety culture, reinforce expectations during pre-shift meetings, recognize employees who demonstrate safe behaviors, and empower team members to identify potential risks before they become problems.
• Week 2: Cleaning and sanitizing with confidence. Teams will evaluate cleaning and sanitizing procedures, review sanitizer concentrations, verify cleaning schedules and reinforce the important distinction between cleaning and sanitizing.
• Week 3: Preventing cross-contamination. Resources will help operators review storage practices and color-coding systems, reinforce proper handling of raw and ready-to-eat foods and identify potential cross-contamination risks throughout the operation.
• Week 4: Reinforcing good personal hygiene practices. Operators can review handwashing procedures, illness reporting policies, and glove-use requirements, as well as incorporate food safety reminders into shift meetings.
• Week 5: Mastering time and temperature control. The final week will focus on verifying thermometer calibration, ensuring that temperature logs are completed accurately, and reinforcing critical temperature requirements with employees.

Used consistently, the weekly resources could become part of a broader strategy for keeping food safety top of mind—used as part of onboarding and training, pre-shift communication, and daily operations.

A strong food safety culture depends on having the right ingredients, following proven processes and applying them consistently. National Food Safety Month provides operators and their teams with a structured opportunity to revisit and strengthen those fundamentals.

Learn more about National Food Safety Month