Food Safety Culture

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the March/April print version of QA under the headline "Starter Culture."

The Journal of Food Protection published a study in July 2024 outlining the root causes of about 400 foodborne illnesses from 2017 to 2019. The top three factors were inadequate oversight, not enough training and a lack of food safety culture.

People are concurrently the top line of defense against foodborne illnesses and the primary cause of them, so food companies cannot thrive without instilling food safety culture into an organization’s workforce.

A panel of cheese industry experts at the American Cheese Society conference last year discussed best practices in food safety training, emphasizing the importance of easy-to-understand, fun components to ensure the lessons stick.

PROMOTING FOOD SAFETY CULTURE.

Food safety starts at the top. Any company that comes into contact with food is required to have a written food safety plan per FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). That plan establishes the “shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mindset and behavior toward food safety in, across and throughout an organization,” according to the Global Food Safety Initiative.

It is crucial for people to follow through on those actions. Sheri Kahnke, director of food safety, quality and regulation at PURIS, recalled a story from her hometown about a culinary science teacher. One of the students had obtained their ServSafe certification and showed their manager, who said, “We don’t believe in using any of that here.”

Instances such as that are “demoters,” which make team members not want to participate in food safety culture. Managers who do not model the desired food safety culture behavior — or violate it entirely — are massive demoters as well.

Kahnke explained, “As your organization grows, those managers are the ones that need to be role modeling the [food safety culture] behavior, so if they violate that behavior, that’s a big red flag.”

Other demoters include not addressing team members who violate food safety culture, not executing your food safety plan, inconsistent change management and poor or unclear communication.

“Let’s make sure [food safety plans] are not just in a binder or on a table. Let’s make sure they’re living documents. Let’s make sure all employees know what those plans are and their role within them,” Kahnke said.

For promoters of food safety culture, Kahnke pointed to clarity and positive reinforcement as motivation for employees to continue upholding it.

“Catch people doing things right, and recognize them for it,” Kahnke said, adding to promote “candid and respectful dialogue … [and] make sure we talk about how people intentionally and unintentionally impact food safety culture.”

A clear vision for where a company is headed promotes positive food safety culture, as does straightforward onboarding, training and leadership development. Kahnke also suggested setting aside time for connection, celebration and fun. Holidays such as World Food Safety Day and National Dairy Month both have celebratory team-building potential.

“If it’s fun and entertaining, that builds a connection to food safety you can implement,” said Dr. Sam Alcaine, associate professor, food science at Cornell University.

THE BASICS OF FOOD SAFETY.

After setting the culture groundwork, Kahnke recommended starting with the basics when educating employees. Some of the basic principles, per the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, are: separate raw from ready-to-eat foods, follow good manufacturing processes (GMPs) and keep up with sanitary design.

“All of those things need to function under this umbrella of food safety culture in order for them to be effective,” she said.

Alise Sjostrom, president and cheesemaker at Redhead Creamery, agreed that the basics are crucial. When team members start at a food facility, they should be taught the organization’s food safety plan that applies to the work they are about to conduct. For Sjostrom, that starts with cross-contamination.

“You’d hate to have a drain brush set in your cheese bath on day one,” she said.

Another common topic is pets at home and how to keep clothing that enters a facility allergen-free. Plants can conduct food safety practices their own way, such as color-coding, so long as regulatory needs are met.

Regardless of the process, team members need to understand not only why food safety is important to the business but also why it is important to them to create buy-in.

Sjostrom’s solution is a training buddy. At Redhead Creamery, she assigns new employees a current employee peer, which allows team members to feel more comfortable from the start, talking to a peer rather than the boss.

FOOD SAFETY CULTURE IS A JOURNEY.

Training buddies and continuing education truly reinforce food safety culture, because “food safety is a journey you pursue every day,” Alcaine said.

“We need committed managers who follow plans, and we need to recognize that everyone contributes when it comes to food safety culture,” Kahnke said. “It’s important that everybody is accountable for what they’re supposed to be doing and that they’re owning that accountability.”

As team members grow in their roles, they need to be tested to ensure food safety standards are met. Sjostrom suggested quizzes to remind teams how much they actually know. For example, companies can use pictures of improper food handling scenarios so employees can see what’s wrong with a given situation. Sjostrom has performed recall drills, during which she calls out a specific cheese to find and test, which has put employees on high alert to streamline that system.

From an educational perspective, Alcaine said it is important to “make food safety tasty” by offering relatable, bite-sized content that makes it easy for employees to focus. Content should not be heavy on jargon and might need to be in a different language for team members whose first language is not English. AI tools are becoming advanced enough to translate multiple languages if an in-house translator is not an option.

HOW TO TEACH FOOD SAFETY CULTURE TO EMPLOYEES.

Alcaine recommended exposing teams to food safety culture every day by showing food safety videos in the changing room and sprinkling trainings into monthly meetings.

“I want to stress the importance of making it a habit, and to make it a habit, you have to make it easy,” Alcaine said.

Kahnke even suggested a food safety board game for continuing education, “like the Game of Life, but you’re following good lab practices.”

All of these strategies aid in continual improvement.

“It’s easy to get complacent,” Kahnke said, “especially if you’re lucky enough to be at an organization where there is really good culture.”

However, food safety culture is not self-sustaining; it requires work on all fronts to keep it steady.

CONTINUING EDUCATION.

There will always be more to learn about food safety, but Sjostrom has vetted team members to assist her in keeping the Redhead Creamery plant running smoothly.

Once they have been promoted to a senior level role, Sjostrom recommended Preventive Control Qualified Individuals (PCQI) training so team members can help oversee production. She begins talking them through sanitary design principles, additional process controls and auditing.

“The hard part is it’s expensive to put employees through that training,” she said. “A lot of the training sessions cost money. Whether or not you feel you can afford that [depends on] whether you can afford to lose products.”

Chad Galer, vice president, food safety and product innovation at Dairy Management Inc., pointed to the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy for industry experts who want to grow their skill sets and pass along their knowledge to their teams.

The panelists all mentioned the Safe Cheesemaking Hub for resources to reinforce food safety culture, and Alcaine offers virtual office hours for food safety questions through the Institute for Food Safety at Cornell University.

Training in any capacity instills food safety culture and builds confidence.

“One part of training is knowledge transfer, but another [part] is helping people change their attitudes around food safety,” Alcaine said.

From survey feedback on his food safety plan workshops, attendees’ attitudes grew more positive about food safety plan components, like hazard analyses, and they felt more confident in being able to complete them successfully after the coaching sessions.

“Let’s please learn from one another so we don’t have to recreate disasters ourselves,” Kahnke said.

She encouraged industry professionals to learn from all types of organizations, not just food, to glean tangential lessons and apply them to food safety culture.

REINFORCING CHANGE.

Food safety culture needs to be at the center of all food facilities, but it takes buy-in from everyone. Individualizing information, and even incentivizing violation reports, can both be helpful to reinforce that culture.

Sjostrom recalled a time when Redhead Creamery packages were bloating. The team developed a system to avoid that issue in the future. It has become a reminder to the entire staff of what can happen if proper systems are not in place.

When all else fails, Alcaine said, “Think about it from a financial perspective to try to change a culture that’s less than ideal.”

As the dairy industry continues to cope with the H5N1 outbreak, food safety culture has become a more frequent conversation, but it is not a topic that should be overlooked once this outbreak has subsided. Food safety culture is about the beliefs, behaviors and mindsets that define what food industry professionals are doing. It is something to invest time and energy into for continuous improvement — to ensure safety, keep employees informed and build people’s confidence in their ability to effect change.

Information for this article was taken from a panel discussion, “A Culture of Training,” at the American Cheese Society conference in July 2024.