Tips to Improve Your Company’s Food Safety Culture

From farm to fork, food safety is a topic that everyone in the supply chain should embrace. The regulatory realities of 2011’s Food Safety Modernization Act were meant to usher in a new foundation in food safety; however, full implementation was interrupted by the pandemic, and numerous significant challenges remain in the fight for safe food. FDA launched its “New Era of Food Safety” in 2020 to refine food safety practices using technology and engaging a more holistic view of the practice of food safety.

One fundamental yet pragmatic question launched a specific key target in this new initiative: “What do people do when no one is looking?” Your company may have a great food safety plan on paper; it may have checked all the boxes. Your hazard analysis and recall plan may have been inspired by pristine, textbook examples of building a cohesive food safety plan. That’s terrific, but what happens on the production floor? What happens in the daily processing environment? What does an employee do when they see something go wrong? It’s critical to engage employees—and management—so that they feel supported in taking on food safety and dedicate themselves to following established protocols.

This is where the concept of “food safety culture” comes into play. Food safety culture is, in essence, the values, beliefs, and habits people share to ensure food is kept safe. “Culture” is a concept that requires a great deal of critical self-analysis, as well as a continued dedication to properly foster, support, and maintain it. Building a culture of food safety demands authentic buy-in from all levels of employees, including:

• Those on the front lines who realize their actions can have a direct consequence on the health and safety of their customers;
• The procurement department that feels empowered to make the right choices to get the right products and services to support food safety as a core value;
• A training coordinator who realizes food safety training is a core concept that should be featured during onboarding and in continuous training opportunities;
• The executive level, who should know that food safety can contribute to a healthy bottom line by mitigating significant risk/cost to the organization, as well as creating safe, quality products for their customers.

Everyone has a role to play in the creation and maintenance of a food safety culture in your operation. Here are four practical areas you can target to help measure the wellness of your food safety culture and to determine just how authentically everyone is connected to those values.

1. Provide continuous training: When it comes to establishing and maintaining a culture of food safety, training should be thought of as continuous and holistic in terms of your organization. As opposed to a “one-and-done” exposure in a topic, training is a way to introduce food safety concepts, as well as revisit them, evaluate them, and provide opportunities for continuous improvement. Some training considerations are:

• Education: Is training available to employees when they join your team? To embed a food safety culture into your company, all stakeholders should have a foundational understanding of food safety. A fundamental starting point is to be sure that food safety and your food safety culture is a target of your onboarding process for new employees. Who leads your food safety team and has passion for the subject? Target that individual as a key resource to introduce employees to food safety concepts, expectations, behaviors, and importance to the business.
• Collaboration: Do you provide training across departmental lines? From the C-Suite to maintenance staff to HR to production employees, the further you engage the diversity of departments and positions, the more that you are universalizing the realities of what food safety requires to be proactively engaged in it: behaviors, standards, goals, materials, and tools. This also provides an opportunity to reaffirm the consequences of not thinking comprehensively about food safety in your operation from all levels and from each person’s role.
• Effectiveness: How frequently are trainings offered throughout the year? Who do you assign to attend those trainings? Do your trainings reflect your findings in your risk analysis? There is no magic number in terms of training opportunities; more important than frequency is the question of efficacy and applicability. Start with those targets first to help understand how your training program needs to be engaged for your operation, and to push the advancement of knowledge with the advancement of application and practice.

2. Give regular feedback: The efficacy of food safety culture training can also be tough to measure once you have trainings in place. To holistically understand how effective your training programs are, consider implementing a program of assessments, conversations, and organizational involvement by personnel. For example, consider conducting regular “interviews” with employees, or distributing questionnaires pertaining to safe quality food (SQF), hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP), key performance indicators (KPIs), and good manufacturing practice (GMP) policies. These tools can help to create opportunities for informal and impromptu mini-training sessions. These meetings are also a chance to build awareness of new procedures and to have open conversations between employees and managers on existing practices.

Within an organization, these are also occasions to empower employees to make informed decisions and become confident in their decision making. Asking them to share any concerns helps to set an understanding that if they see something that concerns them, they should feel comfortable saying something. Active conversations and feedback loops should be supported as parts of daily culture, not treated as isolated events.