Tendering for Public Contracts

There are a number of ways that you can bid for public sector contracts and they are open to businesses of all sizes, in particular the Olympic tenders are being released at the minute and for more details and to register visit – www.competefor.com, this is a free service and will allow you to identify any possible contracts you feel your business may be able to deliver. It is important to remember that when submitting a tender for a contract the provider will want to see the following documents:

Health & Safety Policy

Equality & Diversity Policy – coming soon (we are just updating it!!!)

As a minimum but they may also require an environmental and sustainability policy, you can access templates of all of these from our free health and safety and employment download sections and if you do decide to bid for contract – good luck! Remember if you need any support or guidance; contact your local business link, who there to provide assistance if needed.

Kelly

Food Hygiene Training & the Law

I have had a number of people ask me about the validity of our food hygiene course and whether or not it is accepted by the relevant authorities. These are good questions and I thought would also provide me with the chance to clear up some common misconceptions about the legal requirement you have as a food handler or employer in the catering industry.

Firstly the statement regarding suitable training from the Food Standards Agency:

"Food handlers must receive appropriate supervision, and be instructed and/or trained in food hygiene, to enable them to handle food safely. Those responsible for developing and maintaining the business's food safety procedures, based on HACCP principles, must have received adequate training. The requirements for training should be seen in the context of the nature and size of the business. There is no legal requirement to attend a formal training course or get a qualification, although many businesses may want their staff to do so. The necessary skills may also be obtained in other ways, such as through on-the-job training, self-study or relevant prior experience. The operator of the food business is responsible for ensuring this happens."

Source - http://www.food.gov.uk/foodindustry/regulation/hygleg/hygleginfo/foodhygknow/

This is important, depending on the nature for your job and role within the organisation should heavily reflect the level of training undergone, i.e. it would be expected that an executive chef would have a higher level of knowledge than perhaps a kitchen porter (this is just an example) as they would have to deliver as a minimum some on the job training regarding safe working procedures etc..

So by completing a test with i-hospitality you demonstrate an understanding of the fundamentals of food hygiene and is an ideal introduction before you are ready to progress onto your level 2 or even level 3, the supervisors award. You do not have to renew your food safety certificate every three years as what used to be the case but to demonstrate that you have refreshed your knowledge in a suitable manner, the rough guide for this is between 2 – 3 hours every 2/3 years however I would recommend that it was carried out more regularly than this to ensure that safe practices are continually followed. A syllabus of our food hygiene course online can be found here.

Any other queries or questions we are always glad to help in any way.

Jon

eBay and the online retailer

I was recently asked by a colleague to assist him in setting up an eBay shop in addition to his existing online presence, at first (having not used eBay for a while) I was a little surprised and asked him why, eBay is notoriously expensive, its feedback system favours the customer and the sites structure is not favourable to the type of product he was selling i.e. clothes. He told me that a number of his colleagues have just launched an eBay division and were doing remarkably well.

Anyway, after much investigation I discovered that eBay have made some huge changes and although still expensive when you compare fee's to what you would spend with Google or Yahoo it is surprisingly close. They have now made eBay more accessible to large brands and have introduced a number of initiatives most notably Outlets and Daily Deal.

Outlets have attracted some big high street names and provide a platform for them to sell stock at a reduced price. Daily Deals is open I believe to al power sellers as long as you can meet their product criteria (this changes throughout the year) as an example they were looking for keep fit and home entertainment products throughout January, the idea of this service is that you sell the product at a breakeven price attracting more visitors to your shop. (At Xmas daily deals were getting around 14,000 hits per day)

So after much research into what our competitors were doing and what eBay could offer in terms of flexibility etc. We decided to use an external designer as my HTML is pretty rusty and why waste the time when you can pay someone who knows all the tips and tricks to do it for you. In the end I found a company who quoted me the bargain price of £150!! (inc a £50 discount) Considering all other quotes were £300+ and having said that at least 3 websites did not even get back to me at all!!

The service provided was spot on and if you are considering setting up an eBay shop I would highly recommend this website, if you want to spend more money on your designs etc you can plan for it further down the line. An example of the work can be found here at Buy Jeans Outlet, for that price you can hardly complain, some sites wanted around £800 and tried to sell you some (in my opinion) unneeded SEO service, which is what I pay eBay for - Traffic!!

So the shop is now online and doing very well and we even found time to come up with ten tips when setting up an eBay shop – good luck!

 

James