Building a Food Safety Culture

Each food company has its unique and individual food safety culture created during the years of its existence and most influenced by its leadership. The food safety culture advocated is one of learning, teaching, communicating and empowering. The differences in these elements separate an adequate food safety culture and a company culture that does not have food safety as one of its core philosophy and practical values.

Developing a food safety culture based on human behavior blended with the hard sciences involved with food safety may be the difference in whether a food safety hazard is eliminated immediately or lingers with the potential threat of producing an unsafe product that eventually finds its way to a consumer.

Building a food safety culture based on human behavior is not a foreign concept to the regulatory world. Environmental health specialists have traditionally taught prevention as a tactic for addressing hazards. Companies invest in equipment and training, an example being that the company will install a hand sink, provide employees training in its use, but often they eventually they forgo or forget to enforce its use and neglect to empower employee to take action even when they are aware of misuse of that hand sink. Many companies embrace the concept of HACCP, a food safety preventive control program based on hard science, that can greatly assist in the prevention/control of food safety hazards. However and regardless of the cost of that plan, a company culture that is not accepting and empowered to act when a critical control is not operational can easily render the plan useless.

Collectively uniting hard science and behavior science into a quality process built on continuous improvement is key to reducing the incidence of foodborne illness. This presentation will explore defining a food safety culture, the challenges of building that culture, and provide examples of companies that have embraced the concept of taking a top-down, bottom-up approach to building their “food safety culture.”