5 Questions with Austin Welch, Hygiene Expert, Meritech

1. How can every employee, from production floor worker to upper management, help build a strong food safety culture?

Building a strong food safety culture begins with defining what the food safety culture should look like and its significance in your facility. After the management team sets the standards and everyone understands the expectations of the food safety culture, they can start finding weak spots and training employees.

2. At the management level, what are the biggest obstacles or hurdles to creating a food safety culture?

The key to building a strong food safety culture at the administrative level is figuring out how to measure it effectively. Leadership teams often don’t deal with the day-to-day details of food safety. This makes it important for the administrative team to create KPIs or other measurable metrics. This way, we turn the idea of food safety culture into something real and measurable instead of an intangible ideal.

3. What is the impact of strong food safety education on a food safety culture?

Newcomers into a food processing facility may or may not be bringing the good food safety practices from their previous jobs. To be successful, people need the proper knowledge to thrive in a new workplace. This is where education is essential. By teaching people what the right procedures and processes are, they can confidently uphold the facility’s food safety standards and contribute to a thriving safety culture.

4. For facilities with robust food safety cultures, what do they do differently to make their food safety culture effective?

Facilities that have excellent food safety cultures are constantly talking about food safety. These facilities don’t just have a yearly seminar discussing food safety — they live and breathe food safety. These facilities also have visual reminders that show their commitment to food safety. Some may have signage in their facility reminding their employees about the right processes or have well-designed hygiene zones that make achieving employee hygiene excellence easy.

5. How can introducing automation help support the desired food safety culture?

Automation is a great way to improve food safety culture by making hygiene procedures easier and more efficient. As we all know, ensuring each employee is properly washing their hands is difficult to monitor and enforce. Our automated hygiene equipment simplifies the handwashing process so that no training is necessary. Staff simply places their hands in the system, and after 12 seconds, they have clean hands. This reduces the training and education overhead on employee hygiene while meeting the highest hygiene standards for food safety.