-: My name is Julia Selleys,
I work at Hennepin County Environmental Health,
and I'm a supervising environmentalist.
So I supervise a group of staff,
then basically we're known as the health inspectors.
So we go out and we inspect any place
that serves, sells, or makes food.
And we also do pools, hotels,
basically our job as health inspectors
is to make sure that the public is safe
when you go out to eat or you participate
in recreational behavior.
So part of what we do is, we look up plans.
So when, say, I wanna open ABC restaurant.
So we will actually get a set of the blueprints
for that restaurant, and we'll look over it.
So that's to make sure everything's to code,
but it's also to make sure that when we look at it,
that the food flow makes sense.
'Cause if you can, preventatively,
if you can make sure that a food flow
makes sense through a kitchen,
you can actually prevent further contamination
and illness down the line.
The second part is that when we go out,
we talk to everybody, all the staff, management,
make sure that they know about illness symptoms,
when they shouldn't come to work,
how to wash their hands, how hot to cook food to,
temperature control, and stuff like that.
So generally they're unannounced visits,
and the frequency of those visits
depends on the risk of that establishment.
So if you're just selling candy bars and packaged chips,
well, there's a pretty low risk
that someone's gonna get sick from buying a bag of chips.
Whereas if you're making sushi,
or you're smoking or sous vide-ing some meat,
well that's a higher-risk thing
so we tend to go more frequently.
Our visits are generally unannounced,
although when we do a follow-ups,
if it's deemed necessary,
then those are, can be scheduled
because we wanna make sure that we're giving people
enough time to correct issues.
We do deal with foodborne outbreaks.
So in the event that there is an outbreak,
whether it is a person-transmission,
or whether it's a food product recall,
we do work with our epidemiology staff
to kind of play inspector, essentially,
and figure out why people are getting sick
and make sure we put in proper initiatives
or correct the issue so people don't get sick again.