Tag Archives: food safety culture

By Elise Forward

Food safety and quality professionals are change agents and problem solvers. It is what we do. The manner in which people within an organization respond to change, problems and opportunities for improvement is a reflection of the food safety culture of the organization. Does your organization celebrate when someone correctly decides to shut production down or put a product on hold? Obviously, it is always best to prevent any issues before they arise, but stopping a line to prevent bad product from being produced or catching out-of-specification product before it leaves the facility is better than continuing to produce and ship bad product. These events are often viewed as negative occurrences, and, therefore, many do not see the value of the Food Safety/Quality Assurance department.

Elise Forward will be speaking at the 2016 Food Safety Consortium, December 6–7 in Schuamburg, IL | LEARN MOREHow can we change this viewpoint and positively affect the food safety and quality culture of the organization? A few key factors have a great impact on the culture of an organization. People, systems, access to resources and opportunities for growth are all integral pieces of a stellar food safety culture. In this column, the first of a two-part series, we will explore how people build, change and mold the culture.

First and foremost, people are the number one asset and provide the greatest impact to change. Not only are personnel the eyes and ears of an organization, but they also provide the logic required to make good decisions. Computer technology is amazing, but it cannot fully replace the human ability to process the information. People need to be used to their fullest potential in order to obtain the greatest impact. The following are some ways people can be used to boost the food safety culture of an organization.

Everyone is involved in food safety. A team is always stronger than individuals. Everyone, from the C-suite to the third-shift person in charge of the employee refrigerator and taking out the trash, to the office staff that answers the phones and opens the mail, needs to have responsibility for food safety. In addition, contractors and subcontractors are not immune to providing a significant role in protecting the food safety of your product. All relevant staff must have the appropriate training to understand that what they do affects the food safety of the product as well as the entire facility. Having everyone trained means that many then share the food safety mentality and, therefore, there are stopgaps in the system. As with many issues, it is not one breakdown of the system that leads to a failure but a culmination of many breakdowns. People are still the strongest asset to food safety, so having multiple stopgaps (i.e., people), involved in protecting the process will help ensure that the product remains safe.

Executive responsibility. The responsibility of the overall food safety of products leaving the facility now lies with the executives, as seen by the recent cases involving Peanut Corporation of America, DeCosters and Jensen brothers. Executives and decision makers are accountable for the presence of or lack of appropriate food safety measures. Therefore, when making changes, executives need to understand that these are personal decisions that could affect themselves and their family, in addition to customer confidence as well as profits and losses. Questions such as, “What happens if their name is plastered on the evening news?” and “How will your customers, investors, consumers react if the company has a problem?” should be asked.

Evaluate any decision for food safety consequences. Food safety and quality is directly related to profits and losses. Any issue or change that arises must be evaluated to determine if there are any impacts to food safety. For example, the purchasing department must understand that the items purchased and used on the production floor impact food safety. Therefore, food safety should be on every agenda and part of every decision. This can be as simple as adding to the bottom of every agenda the question, “Is there any way that food safety will be impacted?” The C-suite members should be included in management meetings where additional food safety discussions occur.

Employee trust. Employees must be trusted to keep the product safe in order to safeguard the business and the products. It is human nature to take pride in the work that we are assigned and to strive for excellence. People feel rewarded when they are trusted and will continue to add value to the organization by striving for continuous improvement. This translates to greater attention to food safety and quality.

If an employee cannot be trusted, this person should not be on the payroll. The Food Defense rules specifically require a company to address intentional adulteration from an internal entity. To ensure quality, background checks should be completed on every employee, contractor or sub-contractor who has access to critical areas of the facility.

Food safety should be in every job description. Food safety is everyone’s job, so update job descriptions to include pertinent responsibilities to food safety. At a minimum, everyone should have the “See something, say something” responsibility in his or her job description, in addition to anything specifically related to his or her job. Likewise, it can be valuable to have an independent set of eyes to evaluate a system. Therefore, train and use all personnel that do not have a background in food safety and quality. Departments such as accounting, warehouse, maintenance and personnel should be trained to perform GMP and sanitation audits. Spread these tasks around and your systems will benefit. The people performing the tasks will take pride at being trusted with these important responsibilities and tasks.

While a company or organization may start in an undesirable situation, it is possible to change the environment. Remember, the people you work with are your greatest asset. Value these people; uplift, teach and coach them in the ways of food safety and quality. Your efforts will produce astounding results! In the second half of the discussion on food safety culture, we will discuss other facets that influence food safety culture.

July 26, 2016

New Workers Means New Strategies

By Maria Fontanazza

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Today’s workforce includes several different generations of employees and learning preferences. In part II of a Q&A series with Food Safety Tech, Laura Nelson, vice president of business development at Alchemy Systems, explains how food companies need to adjust to this new environment.

Read Part I of the Q&A: Go Beyond the Classroom to Improve Training PerformanceFood Safety Tech: Should there be different training strategies based on employee demographics?

Nelson: Yes. Our employee demographics are continuously changing and, as a result, those changes impact the effectiveness of our training program. We have five different generations, and each has a learning preference—and some are directly opposed to each other. We have employees who like to learn by reading—baby boomers like things clearly spelled out like detailed sanitation SOPs. And then we have employees who would absolutely not want to read detailed protocols but prefer learning from their fellow colleagues and their supervisor – millennials who prefer micro-burst training and learning through interactions. [Based on] our research conducted in partnership with The Center for Research and Public Policy, when we asked employees their learning preference and what works best for them, the majority (57%) said on the job with a supervisor, and (56%) said on the job with a coworker. Clearly, learning beyond the formal classroom training is taking place every day. We have to ask ourselves how consistent is the food safety program learning experience on the plant floor? Are bad habits, incorrect behaviors and short cuts being reinforced by fellow employees? In a follow-up research question, we asked how much coaching employees receive from their manager and more than 43% of the responding employees said they rarely or never receive coaching.

Our challenge as an industry is to make sure employees are learning in a consistent way through their supervisors and colleagues. It speaks to the all-important role of the frontline supervisor and the fact that we have to arm them with the knowledge and skill to effectively mentor and coach their employees and give them time and the responsibility to do it. It’s important to include soft skills training for supervisors: How do you communicate and motivate employees? How do you encourage them in a way that [facilitates] improvement and reinforces appropriate food safety behaviors?

We also have data that says the quality of onboarding training is an area for improvement—over 20% of respondents rated the quality of their onboard training not good. Some companies are still executing the ‘one-and-done’ training where you spend a full day or two trying to do all the training that the employee needs prior to starting their new job. If an employee is bombarded with food safety training—all the different sanitation information, GMPs, operational controls, SOPs, industry regulations, etc.— by the time the employee leaves for the day, the reality is that they forget more than 80% of it within 30 days. So, our challenges extend beyond the employee learning preferences and where training takes place. We have to improve our training content to really meet [employee] education level, language, and learning preferences and provide in smaller chunks to improve knowledge retention. Our critical food safety messages need to be part of a continuous rolling thunder of communication, meaning you’re not trying to train all at once but rather are building a food safety awareness program, maybe through posters, shift huddle talks or digital signage. It’s the different things you can do that don’t require additional training time but impacts employees with multiple touch points to reinforce these key food safety messages.

Deirdre Schlunegger, CEO of STOP Foodborne Illness

July 21, 2016

Food Safety Culture Club

We Know the Why

By Deirdre Schlunegger

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Food safety culture is not just a catchy phrase or the right thing to say. It is the right thing to embrace and the right thing to implement. But how is it achieved? It is relevant to start with understanding “The Why” behind food safety. Why is it important? Do people really get sick and die? Why does that happen, and what is our role in preventing it? How do we integrate aspects of FSMA with a culture that embraces a robust food safety culture, and how do we create passion around the culture? I continue to address this issue, because at nearly every meeting I attend, in committees in which I serve and in simple conversations with colleagues, I hear the frantic voices of those who have so much to do, results to produce, bosses to please, and staff to supervise, and the why behind food safety is rarely mentioned.

STOP Foodborne Illness, Why Behind Food Safety — We need to truly understand the “why: behind food safety.

I speak to and read about individuals daily who have been sick or lost children or parents to this preventable problem. I see the photos of their children and hear about their loving attributes, yet this aspect is often neglected in the equation of the busy lives of those involved in growing, producing and distributing our food. I get it—who wants to talk about the problem when there is a product to promote and sell? But in reality, the only reason any of us live this frantic life with a long to-do list is because people get sick and die from foodborne illnesses, and because it is our job to do what we can to prevent the illnesses. And while consumers can practice safe food handling, there is nothing they can do about Salmonella in peanut butter, or Listeria in ice cream, cantaloupe or caramel apples. Let’s start the conversation of HOW to change and sustain a strong food safety culture and include the why as our rationale in the conversation. STOP Foodborne Illness is interested and will devote more time to the how, and I hope you will join us in this conversation and endeavor. I would love to hear your thoughts.

June 27, 2016

Food Safety Culture Club

Spreading the Message

By Deirdre Schlunegger

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STOP Foodborne Illness receives many requests to speak at conferences, trainings and meetings. I recently spoke at the Harris County Food Safety Summit in Houston, along with David, one of our Texas volunteers. David became ill from Salmonella after eating at a hospital. The event’s audience consisted of health inspectors, and restaurant owners and managers. It was a great crowd.

At this year’s Food Safety Consortium, STOP Foodborne Illness is holding a fundraiser and honoring heroes in food safety. LEARN MOREAt the United Fresh meeting, I participated on a panel with Rylee, a STOP Nevada volunteer, who spoke about her experiences as a victim of a foodborne illness. Also include on the panel were folks from The California Leafy Green Marketing Agreement to talk about our collaborative training video project. STOP Board Member Jorge Hernandez, also the Chief Food Safety Officer for Wholesome International, moderated the discussion. The video was played (available on STOP’s website). I was asked what I thought about competitive marketing advantage as it relates to food safety. To be honest, I don’t really think about that: STOP Foodborne Illness has an obligation to do what we can to prevent illness and death that stems from foodborne illness. We know that sharing personal stories makes a difference in training.

Now that I’m back in the office, our team has three requests, one for speaking and two requests from media to talk about food safety. We hear a lot about food safety culture these days, but actually taking the steps to facilitate, implement and monitor that change can be more of a challenge. We are reading about so many new technologies and practices related to food safety, which is great, but they must be accompanied by a company’s knowledge and commitment in order to be successful.

We will continue to contribute to the conversation. We are most interested in prevention and in solutions and like you, want to make a difference. We want to have fewer and fewer conversations with devastated family members about their experience with foodborne illness. Thanks again for all you do to create a strong food safety culture. How is your organization instilling a strong culture? Let us know how we can help.

May 23, 2016

Food Safety Culture Club

Changes in Culture

By Deirdre Schlunegger

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The vast majority of foodborne illnesses in the United States results from either a management system failure or human error. This supports our belief that all foodborne illnesses are preventable. With the introduction of FSMA, prevention has become a significant focus in the battle to eliminate foodborne illness.

STOP Foodborne Illness is collaborating with Intrinsic Leadership, LLC to offer a Food Safety Leadership program. The primary objective of this program is to equip leaders with the knowledge, skills and abilities to develop and sustain a culture of prevention relative to food safety.

Successful prevention requires more than just the introduction of new knowledge and skills for workers. Success requires the consistent and ongoing application of those skills.

We know that training can provide knowledge and skill. However, the most significant predictor of long-term success is the extent to which frontline managers actively support behavioral changes within the employee base. Experience shows that transforming an organization to produce superior results is much more than training programs, process improvement or new technology. While each of these elements are important, sustainable improvement occurs when we are able to shift the way people think about the business in a way that drives them to consistently act different then they did in the past. The role of leadership is to:

Frame the business opportunity in a way that inspires employees to seek a better outcome
Relentlessly pursue management system improvement
Represent, support and encourage a culture that aligns with improvement opportunities

Stories are powerful reminders and provide the “why” behind food safety. Below are two such stories.

Raw Milk – E. coli 0157:H7

It is the stories that create the urgency behind the importance of food safety. Christopher’s story is heart breaking—yet, he was one of the lucky ones, as he recovered from his illness.

Cheese – Listeria

Allison survived as well but had a rough entry into the world, as she was diagnosed with Listeriosis shortly after birth.

Frank Yiannas, Walmart, Food Safety Consortium

April 26, 2016

Make Food Safety Culture the Social Norm

By Food Safety Tech Staff

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WATCH VIDEO I: Apply Behaviorial Science Techniques to Food Safety
Most people are influenced by the behavior that surrounds them, especially in a professional environment. In part III of a video series of his presentation at the 2015 Food Safety Consortium, Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, discusses the key role that behavioral science plays in food safety culture and how companies can build a stronger culture by considering the principle of social norms.

Yiannas also touches on how learning through the mistakes of others can be an effective teaching tool.

“I think we have to teach food safety the wrong way sometimes to teach it the right way,” said Yiannas. “I think a lot of food safety professionals create curriculum and modules that are teaching it the right way…when the research is clear—teaching the wrong way can be pretty good.”

Frank Yiannas, VP of Food Safety, Walmart

March 18, 2016

Use Homophily to Deliver Food Safety Message

By Food Safety Tech Staff

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Watch part I of the video with Frank Yiannas: Apply Behavioral Science Techniques to Food SafetyWho is your company charging with delivering the food safety message? Are they believable? Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, provides insights about how companies should be spreading their message when implementing a behavior-based food safety program. By applying the principle of homophily, companies (especially global organizations) can communicate more effectively with employees—and in a more believable way.

March 14, 2016

Food Safety Culture Series: 2016 Outlook

By Maria Fontanazza

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In the final article in Food Safety Tech’s Q&A series on food safety culture, Lone Jespersen, director of food safety at Maple Leaf Foods, and Brian Bedard, executive director of the GMA Science and Education Foundation sound off on the development of food safety culture this year.

Food Safety Tech: Where are we headed in the food safety culture landscape in 2016?

The GMA Science Forum takes place April 18–21, 2016 in Washington, DC | LEARN MORELone Jespersen: I think we’re going down a path of standardizing or at least agreeing on a set of definitions for food safety culture. Some of this will come out of the GFSI technical working group on food safety culture. That will lead us to better guidelines for what the different components of food safety culture are. That’s going to be strongly science based and collectively agreed upon. I think we’ll see a lot of that work done in 2016.

I think we’re also going to see a greater focus on connecting food safety culture to organizational culture. Many organizations are looking at integrating food safety and quality assessments into their organizational culture assessments and I think for larger organizations this makes sense.

I hope we’ll get closer to having compared measurement systems and be able to publish work around that so we don’t fall into a trap of a fragmented and independent approach, but rather building on each other as we work [together] and have a common definition.

Brian Bedard: The measurement tools and the gap analysis for which these tools are being developed needs to be done. In terms of operationalizing and actually getting food safety embedded in companies, I would envision a roadmap that looks at a four-tiered framework of who the targets are for changing behaviors. That would be focused around senior leaders in an organization, mid-level managers, supervisors in operations, and at the fourth level, the operators on the plant floor. At GMA’s Science & Education Foundation, we have a group of companies investing in this to roll out a portfolio of training programs. We’re trying to consolidate them under the umbrella of food safety culture and dealing with the full spectrum, from entry level and plant operators through to senior leadership.

March 8, 2016

Food Safety Culture Series: Measuring Behavior

By Maria Fontanazza

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Food safety culture is yet another example of the current and future state in food safety: The movement toward being proactive versus reactive. There are still many questions surrounding how companies should be measuring behavior and a lot of companies don’t know where to start. Lone Jesperson, director of food safety at Maple Leaf Foods, provides some guidance in part 3 of Food Safety Tech’s series on food safety culture.

Food Safety Tech: What are the most important behaviors that organizations should be measuring?

Lone Jespersen: I think we need to get the order right. You start by figuring out the metrics, which should drive behavior, not the other way around. If you’re not clear on how you’re going to measure success, then how are you going to know that the behaviors you’ve identified will make a difference to the safety of your products or food?

Ultimately you want to be in a situation where people are looking out for food safety so that if something goes wrong, it’s constructively brought forward and fixed. Predictive and preventive measures are defined and implemented as needed. When talking about food safety—the metrics and behaviors—these depend on the organization’s state of maturity. [For example,] in an organization with a relatively low level of maturity that doubts whether food safety [culture] is something that is going to help the business, they’re mostly checking boxes and conducting food safety tasks because regulators are saying they have to.

So if you’re in that state of doubt, I would look at measuring something like: Are you completing your food safety training? Does that manager complete food safety communication on a regular basis? Has the plant done its risk assessment in a standardized way? Do they have tools and infrastructures in place to meet food safety requirements? That can spill over into a measurement that your plant manager actively enforces the training schedule for food safety. It [becomes] a behavior you can define outright and measure the plant manager on.

The GMA Science Forum takes place April 18–21, 2016 in Washington, DC | LEARN MOREOn the other end of the maturity model, there’s the relatively high level of sophistication and maturity for food safety. For example, a CEO completes a food safety workout session in which he or she sits down and looks at what the plant needs to do to improve food safety, and the decisions are made on the spot. When you’re in that level of maturity, you’re improving your food safety costs, because you have better control of your food safety program and you’ll get more uptime, less downtime, and make product that goes out safely.

We’ve had some great discussions around food safety culture metrics. But I think we’re a little misguided, because we’re not measuring food safety culture, we’re measuring the organization’s performance, and food safety culture is an enabler that is tracked to performance. So if you have a weak culture, it’s reasonable to assume you’ll have higher costs and a higher level of incidents, and less competent individuals. There are some characteristics you can put around the performance of food safety if you have a weak culture. There’s lots of research that shows the connection between organizational effectiveness and organizational culture. I have yet to find a counterargument that says it should be different for food safety culture.

It’s not a food safety culture metric that you need, it’s a performance effectiveness measure. We are looking at culture because we want to improve our performance—for consumer and business protection.

Brian Bedard, GMA, Food Safety Consortium

March 2, 2016

Food Safety Culture Series: Where the Leaders Are

By Maria Fontanazza

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Most industries face issues with breaking down silos and promoting cross-functional collaboration. For the next class of leaders to be well equipped to promote and practice a strong food safety culture, more work needs to be done on alignment within organizations and across industry. In part II of Food Safety Tech’s series on food safety culture, Brian Bedard, executive director of the GMA Science and Education Foundation and Lone Jespersen weigh in on leadership.

Food Safety Tech: Food Safety Culture requires strong professional leaders. How can industry work together to develop the leadership that is needed?

The GMA Science Forum takes place April 18–21, 2016 in Washington, DC | LEARN MORELone Jespersen: We start by acknowledging that we have an abundance of strong leaders in the food industry. We don’t need to build from the ground up or something new. We need to look at what makes [these leaders] strong. Why are some leaders more successful than others? Identify the companies that have strong food safety leaders that are not within food safety—those that come from finance, HR, procurement, and the CEO—and formally acknowledge their technical and leadership competencies.

I’m aware of three organizations that are actively looking at what constitutes a food safety professional and its competencies—IFPTI (International Food Protection Training Institute) in the United States, Safe Food Canada, and the International Union of Food Science and Technology. Alignment between the work conducted by each of these organizations is important to shorten the time between development and business impact. It’s really important to get this alignment. The more we keep working in small subgroups while not comparing notes and agreeing on those competencies, the more we’re going to see the cost of developing leaders going up. And we’ll have fewer strong leaders, because it will be hard for individuals to move on in their career if it is not clear what it means to be a competent, strong food safety leader.

There’s a very large group of food safety leaders, the ‘Malcolms-in-the-Middle’ who are excellent leaders and are one or two steps down from the head of food safety in an organization. Sometimes we forget that we have strong leaders at this level, and they have a much stronger handle on food safety culture because they’re the ones who have to make sure programs work for frontline associates, supervisors, and managers. Letting that level become more visible to what their competencies are or should be and making sure that they contribute and are heard in the conversations [is important].

Brian Bedard: We need to collaborate and get some alignment around what we think leaders need. Unfortunately, this is creating a competitive space among service providers and training entities that can work with leaders.

There are a couple of fundamental principles that need to be addressed:

The leaders at the top need to recognize and drive it down through their entire system so that everyone is responsible in terms of their annual work and development plans, including metrics and the deliverables in their annual evaluations
The ‘Malcolms-in-the-Middle’ who, in most cases, manage the budget. It’s critical to get them on board to ensure that, when making investments, they’re spending money on driving food safety culture throughout an organization
Several specific opportunities now exist to promote food safety culture leadership, including the Food Safety Leadership Workshop being offered by the GMA Science and Education Foundation at the upcoming GMA Science Forum (April 18, Washington, DC).

Raw Milk – E. coli 0157:H7

Cheese – Listeria

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