Tag Archives: education

Deirdre Schlunegger, CEO of STOP Foodborne Illness
Food Safety Culture Club

Motivating the Culture Shift

By Deirdre Schlunegger
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Deirdre Schlunegger, CEO of STOP Foodborne Illness

At the 2016 Food Safety Consortium, STOP Foodborne Illness will have a fundraiser to honor heroes in food safety. |December  6, 2016, 7–9 pm | LEARN MOREIn 2012 STOP Foodborne Illness established a relationship, which evolved into a partnership, with the California Leafy Green Marketing Agreement (LGMA) organization. On my first visit to LGMA, I met key staff members and observed a mock audit. We had good initial conversations. Scott Horsfall, CEO of LGMA, and I continued to talk and a second visit ensued, this time with individuals who had been ill with E-Coli from Leafy Greens. Everyone was a bit nervous, but it was a productive and even healing experience. We visited farms and processing plants, heard from farmers and shared a lovely meal outdoors with the farmers. On the last day, we sat in a room with tables configured in a large square and each person took turns introducing themselves, talking about why they were at the table, what roles they had in the leafy green business, and the visitors shared personal heart wrenching stories of illness and death from foodborne illness.  There was not a dry eye in the room during and after this encounter. Every farmer vowed to do everything possible to prevent pathogens from making their way into the market place. This was a profound experience for everyone involved.

The following year, Scott proposed that STOP Foodborne Illness and LGMA jointly create a video for training purposes. That project came to life in the summer of 2014. It is a video and a project that LGMA and STOP Foodborne Illness professionals are deeply proud of and love to share with others (the video comes in several versions and is available in Spanish). Scott and I continue to speak about the partnership and look for additional ways to collaborate.

Food safety is about collaboration and finding solutions and preventing illness and death from foodborne pathogens. This week I spoke with a mother whose daughter died a year ago from foodborne illness (not from produce). I told her that I so badly wish that we could have prevented her beautiful daughter’s death and vowed to continue this important work. We are not there yet: Each of us must be completely committed to getting to a place where we don’t hear these stories.  And we will get there by keeping the “why” at the forefront and continuing to develop critical strategies that reduce and work to eliminate the problem. Thank you to all who are dedicated to creating and sustaining a safe food supply and a special thanks to LGMA. You can see the LGMA video, “Video: The Why Behind Food Safety”, on our homepage.

Michelle Jones, Shake Shack
Retail Food Safety Forum

Simple Food Safety Training Combats Turnover

By Michelle Jones
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Michelle Jones, Shake Shack

Retail food establishments face many challenges, and employee retention is one of the major concerns. Employee retention affects scheduling, hiring, and the overall effectiveness of training.  Food safety training usually suffers when turnover occurs.

The safety of customers is dependent on an employee’s knowledge and execution of the food safety standards that are in place.

The biggest challenge in training in the retail/hospitality industry is the risk that the employee may leave within the first year (or less) of employment. According to Restaurant.org, the average turnover rate for the restaurant/hospitality sector was 66.3% in 2014.1 This turnover rate creates a challenge for maintaining a solid food safety culture.

Restaurants can take proactive steps to create and maintain a food safety culture that is always visible to new and current employees by adopting various techniques.

Signage Is Your Friend

Signage throughout your restaurant is a great way to continuously relay a food safety message without confining employees to a computer or module-based system.  This signage should be simple, sometimes playful and right to the point. An employee or manager takes roughly 30 seconds, on average, to read a message, so the shorter the better.

Visual signage is always a great tool to use in the back of house to relay food safety standards (e.g., proper cooking temperatures, order of storing food in coolers, etc.).  Signage (photos specifically) may also assist employees who may not communicate in English proficiently.  A picture is worth a thousand words, so utilize photos, cartoons or captions in order to relay the message.

Target the Leader

A quality assurance/food safety team should focus its training on the leaders of a region and/or district. Managers have more incentive to stay with companies longer; therefore, food safety training will be retained for a longer period. They may also visit their locations more frequently than the food safety professional, which gives them additional contact with the restaurant-level staff.

To assist these managers in their communication and verification of standards, compose a customized checklist for them to complete during a restaurant visit. The checklist should fulfill the following:

  1. Highlight the top opportunities they seek out (hand washing, sanitizer concentration, etc.)
  2. Provide the proper corrective action to eliminate the opportunities
  3. Considers their time.  A manager does not have the ability to complete a five-page checklist. Keep it simple—just the facts!

If these managers are well versed on food safety and sanitation and procedures, they will be able to hold their restaurants to a higher level of compliance.  So provide them with all of the tools they need to communicate to their employees.

Informed Employees Are Powerful Employees

Creating newsletters or publications serve as a great tool to keep employees informed of food safety policies. These articles can highlight trends in your company and new products available for use (i.e., chemicals, thermometers, etc.).

By law, every restaurant must have an area where employee information is listed (minimum wage, disability rights, etc.).  This board is the perfect place to post your publication.

In conclusion, keeping employees trained on proper food safety standards is the best way to ensure your customers are safe and your brand is protected. Implementing various forms of communication of these standards will create a strong foundation for an excellent food safety culture to exist.

Reference

  1. National Restaurant Association. Hospitality employee turnover rose in 2014.  March 11, 2015.
Dollar

FDA Makes FSMA Education and Training Available

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Dollar

As part of FDA’s FSMA training vision, the agency has announced two funding opportunities aimed at providing outreach, education and training on the FSMA preventive controls rules.

The Native American Tribes Outreach, Education and Training cooperative agreement will provide up to $750,000 annually for three years. “FDA anticipates that federally recognized tribes will need food safety education and training that addresses the regulatory requirements of the applicable FSMA rules and also encompasses specific cultural practices associated with produce farming and food manufacturing/processing within tribes relevant to their status as sovereign nations,” according to an FDA release.

The Local Food Producer Outreach, Education, and Training agreement will award local food producers $1.5 million this fiscal year with the potential for two more years if federal funds are available. It aims to assist small and mid-size producers/processors with particular practices related to their scale of production and management practices. The agreement will focus on those involved in local food systems while considering “account diversified, sustainable, organic and identity-preserved agricultural production and processing.”

Empower Employees to Make Decisions

By Maria Fontanazza
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At this year’s IAFP 2015 conference, there was a lot of buzz surrounding food safety culture and employee behavior. Laura Nelson, vice president of business development at Alchemy, shares her insights on the importance of empowering employees. This is achieved through providing training that gives them the confidence to make immediate decisions on the facility floor.

“We have to own the fact that employees are the key. They are exposed to the product and they’re really the ones touching our food every day,” says Nelson. “And yet, we don’t do a really good job at training and measuring that effectiveness in their execution of the behaviors that we train them on, on the plant floor.”

In the following video, Nelson talks about what industry is doing right in food safety culture, and the areas in which improvement is needed moving forward.

The Accountability Factor in Food Safety Culture

By Maria Fontanazza
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To build an organizational culture that embraces true food safety preventive controls, give employees the autonomy to make critical decisions.

Strengthening food safety culture within a company goes beyond the quality function in raising the banner for food safety: Engagement across an organization, from human resources to maintenance to operations are essential. In a recent Q&A with Food Safety Tech, Laura Nelson, vice president of business development and professional services at Alchemy Systems, discusses how companies can train employees working on the plant floor to help them attain a level of empowerment to take an active, preventative role in food safety, as well as how to engage executive leadership in sharing and evaluating metrics.

Food Safety Tech: How does the accountability of employees play into FSMA implementation?

Laura Nelson: FSMA is going to be additive to what [companies] are doing now in some ways. When you look at FSMA, I think about formalized programs for some companies that may not have a full-blown environmental program that is managed as a preventive control. There’s a lot of training [involved], not only in executing the environmental program, but also in how you maintain your environment to prevent those microbial niches. You start to drill back from the actual protocol of environmental monitoring, and what you do when you receive a positive listeria. How can we start educating employees to be able to recognize the niche? [For example,] is it a cramped pushcart, or damage to [something] holding product where it can’t be properly cleaned? You start educating employees at the level that they can play a more preventative role [in recognizing] they need to take equipment out of commission or send it to maintenance because it can’t be cleaned. This is when we start to see a real change in the culture of a plant. People move beyond these SOPs and requirements to a much more facilitative and educational role to drive the support of some of the FSMA requirements.

The other thing I see is record keeping: There’s a big criticality in maintaining records. People maintain a lot of data now, and there’s a lot of ancillary information included. We just haven’t had the scrutiny on record keeping. The auditors will look through it and find the information they need, but it will be a different [level of] scrutiny when FDA inspectors start to look at the data out there. I think that provides a big opportunity for industry to look at how they maintain records, what they use, and how to capture it. Again, it rolls down to employees—educating them on what is a proper record.

FST: Is facilitating employee awareness and training a challenge faced by more smaller companies versus larger organizations?

Nelson: I think large and small companies face the same challenge, and that is to elevate the knowledge of their employees (they are the eyes and ears) to help them maintain your food safety programs. It goes beyond an SOP on how to clean a piece of equipment or wash their hands. It’s more of understanding the “whys” behind it so they can be line-of-sight. They’re [on the floor] 24/7; they’re the ones who see equipment getting damaged, or drips and leaks. For them to understand and recognize what kind of risk that introduces into a plant [enables them] to raise their hand to prompt some corrective action.

There are food companies out there that are looking to achieve that level of autonomy of giving employees the ability to stop a line because there’s a food safety issue. These are hourly workers that have the autonomy to do that. That’s a huge thing. If you’re able to do that, you’ve far surpassed the basic compliance of any kind of training or education. You’re really looking at an organizational culture that has embraced true food safety preventative controls program.

FST: Food Safety Culture makes the connection between employee behavior and accountability, and establishing metrics. What are your thoughts on Food Safety Culture moving forward?

Nelson: It’s very hard to monitor behaviors. It’s easier to do classroom training and check that box. [It’s the] “how-to”: How do you do that? How do you mature your food safety culture to a point where you get to that autonomy point? We know that you need to go beyond letting employees read SOPs and sign-in [sheets], and say they understand it and move on. You have to move beyond classroom training where you’re giving employees what they need to know and telling them the requirements. You have to connect those behaviors, and then monitor and observe those behaviors, and validate that you’re executing on them. Then it’s applied onto the plant floor.

Embrace the culture of helping each other. Once you’ve achieved this: if your employees are executing when you’re not looking, that’s culture. It’s integrated and something that people embrace.

We did some research on the topic and developed an iPad coaching tool that allows people to systematically gather the data, to capture and automate it. We found that supervisors appreciated it because they had something that was clear and gives them dialogue on what to say in the event that something was missed.

FST: Where should companies focus when training and educating employees to reach a stage of empowerment?

Nelson: The training needs to be at the [appropriate] education level; it needs to be in the language they that understand. [For example,] companies may be able to do a lot more with pictures to accommodate non-English speaking folks in their plant.

Employees need to be challenged and quizzed to make sure they understand the information. The training itself needs to be tied to metrics:  What are you trying to achieve as a plant and therefore [need] to train people on? This should be tied into factors such as customer complaints, quality issues, and what has a direct impact on what employees are doing or not doing, as this [leads to] much more accountability. That’s where the role of the frontline supervisor is critical. That position is absolutely key to the success of driving food safety program compliance. We have to recognize that our frontline supervisors need the skills to motivate employees and communicate effectively with them, including discussing the challenges in conflict resolution.

Elevating food safety so employees as are aware. Awareness programs have a documented advance to people trying to drive specific requirements. We’ve seen a lot of people develop awareness programs around food safety and provide the focus in the plant on key elements that people struggle with. That way, they’re able to have multiple touch points (posters, digital signage, huddle guides). This is absolutely key as we move forward: not just training, but ongoing awareness.

FST: How can companies further educate management to understand the value of food safety culture and reach a point of alignment?

Nelson: There is and can be a pretty big disconnect between executive leadership and what is going on related to food safety. When you talk about the collaboration of the team and those within the plant, you have to include your executive management team. They should understand the different activities and efforts that go into driving a food safety program in a plant. When talking about metrics and evaluating effectiveness, that data should be shared with the executive team on a routine basis so that everyone is clear on what is happening in the plant as well as the results. If the results aren’t where we want them to be, and we’re not in a continuous improvement mode, then what is it going to take to get there? That dialogue should be had.

If you don’t continue to educate your executive team on what issues you’re seeing, then you start creating a divide within the organization. That’s part of what stems from people struggling with a lack of resources and time; this disproportionate disconnect is between other activities within a plant. Communication needs to be routine; people need to be held accountable for metrics so that you’re actually tracking to them. And if you need [more] resources, it’s the perfect way to start building a case for getting additional sales, technology, programs or procedures.

Food Safety Tech’s Food Safety Culture Series

Embed Food Safety Culture. There’s No On/Off Switch

Food Safety Culture: Measure What You Treasure