We’ve been working on something for a while now, and it’s finally at the point where it makes sense to start sharing it more publicly.
It’s called Just Safe Food.
At a basic level, it’s a food safety training. If you work in a restaurant, you already know the type—food handler certification, the thing you need in order to do your job. Millions of people take these courses every year, usually at the beginning of a job or when something expires.
So in one sense, this is very familiar.
But the reason we started working on it has less to do with the content of those courses, and more to do with the role they play in the industry.
Food safety training is one of those rare things that touches almost everyone in food service. It’s required, it’s standardized, and it happens at scale. Restaurants need it to operate, and workers need it to get hired. There aren’t that many systems like that.
Once you notice that, it raises a different kind of question.
If something is required for millions of people, every year, what else could it be doing?
Just Safe Food comes out of the work of One Fair Wage, and a pretty simple observation from that work.
Workers are already paying into this system.
Every time someone gets certified, money is changing hands. It’s not a huge amount individually, but at the scale of the industry, it adds up quickly. And historically, that money has flowed in one direction, into a fairly centralized set of institutions.
We don’t think most people spend much time thinking about that. It’s just part of the job.
So we started with a straightforward idea.
What would it look like to build an alternative?
One that still does the job—meets requirements, issues certifications, works for employers—but is grounded a little differently. Something built with the people who actually use it, and a little closer to the reality of how the work happens day to day.
That’s what we’ve been building.
The training itself is designed to be clear, practical, and usable. It covers the same fundamentals you’d expect, but it’s structured around how people actually move through a shift, rather than an idealized version of it. It’s mobile-first, straightforward, and doesn’t assume you’re starting from zero.
We’ve also included things that tend to get left out, but come up all the time once you start talking to workers—basic information about rights, expectations, and how to handle situations that aren’t covered in a standard module.
At the same time, this isn’t just a course.
It’s the first layer of something a bit larger that we’re building in parallel, which is a broader system for service workers to access information, support, and eventually each other. The training is one entry point into that, simply because it’s already something people are required to do.
We didn’t invent that requirement. We’re just trying to use it more intentionally.
We’re still early.
The course is live, people are starting to use it, and we’re in the process of expanding—more trainings, more partners, more places where it can be adopted. A lot of the work right now is just talking to people who run restaurants, people who work in them, and figuring out what actually makes this useful.
That part matters more than getting the language exactly right.
If you’re in the industry, you’ll probably recognize what this is trying to do pretty quickly.
If you’re not, it might just look like another training.
Either way, we’re glad it’s out in the world.