Here’s the story of how the Hospitality Training Center began by providing food safety instruction in a classroom setting, then developed a new online method that accelerates the learning process, and now offers that method for free to anyone who is interested obtaining a ServSafe certification in the fastest and easiest way possible.
Founded in 2009, the Hospitality Training Center was originally an educational consultancy firm with a fully equipped training facility located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At that time our focus was to provide hands on training for restaurant owners and managers who were seeking the ServSafe Food Protection Manager certificate.
During the first six years, the Hospitality Training Center grew quickly and was soon providing classroom style trainings with both written and online exams to thousands of foodservice workers throughout Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, and North Dakota.
Our primary goal has always been to ensure that every student gains a complete understanding of food safety so they will be fully prepared to pass the ServSafe exam. In order to acheive this, our creative staff developed a new training method that makes the boring subject of food safety much easier to digest. Ultimately we were successful with over 96% of our students passing the exam on their very first attempt.
The new training method arose after years of experience training students from a variety of backgrounds. While experimenting with several differnet styles of instruction and expanding on the successes of each one, the new method evolved into what you will find in this website.
Our new training method condenses all of the knowledge required to pass the exam into three broad categories and relies heavily on the use of practice tests and flashcards rather than boring lectures. As we began implementing the method for our students, our classrooms and our instructors became less important while our website became the new focal point of our lessons.
At that time, we continued providing classroom lectures alongside our new training method because students still needed to be physically present when taking the exam. But now online proctoring is available with ProctorU so we decided that the Hospitality Training Center will dedicate our mission to a different approach.
ServSafe does not require someone to attend a class or take an online course in order to become certified. The only requirement is that they must have sufficient knowledge of food safety to pass the exam.
Students loved our new method because it made learning so much easier, but they hated attending the classes. Many foodservice workers are not able to take time from work to attend a class. And many of them are on a tight budget due to the low pay often associated with this line of work. We realized that it would be unethical for us to make our students attend a class when everything they needed to learn the subject was available for free on our website. And when they became confident enough to take the exam, they could arrange to meet with a proctor at time that is convenient for them. That’s how our concept of “ServSafe Self-Study” was born.
In 2018 the Hospitality Training Center closed it’s doors as a training facility and began to focus entirely on the website alone. We maintain a bare-bones staff to stay updated with the new policies and curriculum developed by ServSafe and for the general upkeep and maintenance of the website. Our website is completely free for use by anyone who is interested in the subject of ServSafe food safety. Our efforts are supported by the small income generated by the advertisements that you may see on our pages and from the generous donations given by the supporters who beleive in our mission.
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711 Hennepin Ave STE 314
Minneapolis, MN 55403
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Info@HospitalityTrainingCenter.com
