Food Safety Culture: If You Can’t Measure It, Then Do You Really Have One?

There has been a renewed produce industry discussion about food safety cultures, as there well should be. Recurrent illness outbreaks associated with fresh produce consumption, the emergence of Cyclospora as a seasonal risk factor, and the prominence of innovative technologies and strategies in the FDA’s “Era of Smarter Food Safety” point to the business imperative of creating science-based, proactive food safety cultures. Sometimes companies are so preoccupied with navigating third-party audits and demonstrating compliance with regulatory and customer requirements that they assume they have a proactive food safety culture, when in fact they have a collection of external requirements that communicate compliance with somebody else’s view of what their food safety program should be.

A Definition of Food Safety Culture for the Produce Industry

One of the best-known proponents of food safety cultures has been Frank Yiannas¹, who formerly led the food safety teams at Disney and then Walmart before joining the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response. In his book on the subject, he reviews definitions of food safety cultures, including one proposed by the Health and Safety Commission in 1993². I have adapted that definition and tailored it to the produce industry:

A produce safety culture is the combination of individual and group behavioral patterns, values, attitudes, and competencies that drive corporate responsibility and commitment to fresh fruit and vegetable safety.

The responsibility of developing corporate culture falls directly on the executive leadership of a company. Every company, big or small – a family farm, a multi-facility processor, or a multinational retailer – has a corporate culture. The question is always whether that corporate culture values produce safety? Notice I did not say prioritize, I said value.

Company priorities can change rapidly in reaction to new business opportunities, modified strategic plans, unexpected staff changes, company restructuring, or any number of other factors. Values are more constant. They speak to the core beliefs of a business. Company values are the foundation of an organization and should be shared by all employees. Senior executives must own corporate values, instill them in their employees, and model them every day. At its foundation, making sure a company’s culture values food safety initiatives and integrates these values into its culture is an exercise in managing change: e.g., employee behaviors and attitudes, resource allocations, internal and external communications, customer relations, selection of suppliers and service-providers, hiring practices, and compensation strategies.

A Model for Changing Your Organization’s Food Safety Culture

There are any number of models for managing change. An eight-step model proposed by John Kotter³ from Harvard Business School that was developed in 2002 seems to match up well with produce safety culture development. I have made some additions and modifications consistent with other published work^4,5 that might help stimulate thought:

1. Create a sense of urgency to inspire and motivate employees. This helps them understand their roles in the safety of the company’s products and the need to change behaviors. It is important to set objectives and make them real and relevant to each employee.
2. Select a guiding team to manage change. Choose a multifunctional team of employees from across the organization with the emotional commitment and the skill sets to guide the change process. This approach promotes ownership in the food safety culture beyond senior management.
3. Create a clear vision. Senior management must work with the team to develop a clear vision for the desired produce safety culture and strategies to achieve the vision.
4. Communicate with employees and gain their buy in. Engage employees from every department by clearly communicating the commitment to food safety and its value. Appeal and respond to people’s needs. Use the communications technologies your employees use to ensure messages are uniformly received.
5. Empower action. Senior managers and the guiding team should seek to remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback, and enlist support from leaders. Measure success and reward and recognize progress and achievement.
6. Create short-term wins. At first, the guiding team should set goals (with senior management direction) that are measurable and easily achieved. Have a manageable number of initiatives and drive completion before starting new ones. Set up key performance indicators and transparently measure and communicate progress throughout the company.
7. Persist and don’t let up. Senior management must encourage persistence within the guiding team and employees to achieve ongoing behavioral and structural changes. Collect data and require frequent progress reports. Highlight achievements and set future milestones based on mutually agreed upon measurables.
8. Sustain and refine changes. Building a business culture that values produce safety is a continuous improvement process. It is important to reinforce the value of achieved changes with employees. It is equally important to recruit, promote, and identify new change leaders within the organization. Guard against the human tendency to revert to the “old” ways.

In an earlier blog on food safety cultures published by iFoodDS, I was quoted as saying how important it is to use data to help drive needed behavioral changes and monitor progress as companies evolve their food safety cultures. This thought is borne out of the old maxim that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The process for changing food safety culture described above certainly provides numerous opportunities for measurement. Every step of the process requires data collection and analysis.

Certainly, an evolving produce safety culture should use data to identify cultural needs and measure positive change to permit:

Reassessment of company produce safety performance and routine compliance

Use existing data to establish a set of food safety key performance indicators (KPIs). For example:

• Wash water disinfection performance versus operational parameters
• Pre-op inspection performance and lost time to corrective actions
• Third party audit results
• Employee education and training participation
• Environmental monitoring test results and efficacy of corrective actions.

Evaluate recent performance history against these KPIs and analyze trends over time to detect improvements as the company’s food safety culture transforms. This can lead to the development of daily scorecards that measure and track food safety KPIs and help drive engagement and change in the organization.

Promotion of teamwork internally

As an example, most companies have facility and equipment sanitation programs, but surprisingly few capture data from these efforts and evaluate the data over time to identify areas where improvements are needed. Proper cleaning and sanitation from farm to distribution center operations requires the cooperation of a diverse set of employees – from the maintenance, sanitation, operations, and food safety teams to senior management that must allocate resources to ensure the sanitation operations are robust. Performance data collection and analysis can connect these employee groups and create an awareness that their performance is being measured. This motivates them to improve their cooperation to achieve food safety objectives.

Synchronization of business cultures

All businesses have suppliers and buyers. On the supply side of the industry, grower-shippers and processors rely on grower partners, ingredient suppliers, packaging companies, transportation providers, harvesting contractors, and others to participate in bringing products to market. It is essential that these strategic vendors be viewed as partners. The vendors’ performance and measurement against food safety needs must correspond to the company’s values. Businesses must use supplier verification programs incorporating food safety performance data when selecting these partners, and the company must commit to exclusive use of approved suppliers at all times.

The same concept should apply to retail and foodservice buyers. A proactive, science-based food safety culture would place value on shared food safety objectives beyond costs, historic relationships, or seasonal marketing opportunities.

Reimagining future human resource needs

Data collection strategies and analytics measuring and supporting a company’s food safety culture should be designed and executed by personnel that are qualified to do so. In other words, businesses should recruit employees trained in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Indeed, a culture where food safety is valued and built on applied science and data analytics can serve to attract STEM-trained employees. Building a food safety culture may also entail revisiting employee education and creating a performance-based merit increase, plus a bonus plan that integrates food safety responsibilities into each employee’s yearly objectives.

Informing financial investment

The process of evolving a company’s food safety culture will ultimately drive a reevaluation of food safety capital and ongoing expense strategies. It makes sense – there are no free rides in business. However, it always surprises me that more produce companies do not look at food safety in terms of return on investment. Food safety is often mistakenly looked at as “another cost center” eroding profitability, when in fact it is an operational expense central to the sustainability of the company.

A company that values food safety and incorporates the operational rigor required to execute its food safety objectives will inevitably be an efficient, focused operation with employees that are engaged every day and customers that come to loyally support them. So, the return on investment comes from:

• Employee engagement and the team building that generates
• The analysis of the operation and the identification of efficiencies required to build risk-based systems
• Recruitment and retention of employees that build upon and share corporate values
• The growth of customers into strategic partners
• The reduced likelihood of product recalls and illness outbreaks associated with the company’s products

In the end, building an authentic, risk- and science-based food safety culture is only possible when a company:

• Chooses to value food safety as a core belief
• Commits to a process to manage the necessary changes in personal and corporate behavior
• Uses the best science to guide strategies
• Employs data as the foundation that underpins the entire business culture and provides measures to track progress and identify hurdles

Produce companies are historically driven by market analyses, sales data, yield assessments, cartons packed per minute, and order fulfillment metrics. These performance indicators are measured and routinely used to drive business decisions. They are part of the fiber of almost every produce company. So where are our food safety metrics? Why does food safety data usually sit in three ring binders on a shelf or exist in a database that is only used to demonstrate compliance with an externally derived food safety standard when an auditor visits? I think the old adage is correct, if we can’t measure food safety every day then we can’t manage it. The corollary is that if a company cannot manage its food safety program, then it cannot possibly create a proactive food safety culture to protect its future and the customers and consumers it serves.

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1. Frank Yiannas. (2009). Food Safety Culture, Springer Science + Business Media, LLC, Spring Street, New York.
2. Health and Safety Commission. (1993). Third report of the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations. Organizing for Safety. ISBN 0-11-882104-0.
3. John Kotter. (2002). Leading Change. 8-Step Model for Change. https://www.kotterinternational.com.
4. Whiting, M. A., and Bennett, C. J. (2003). Driving toward “0”: Best practices in corporate safety and health. The Conference Board. Research Report R-1334-03-RR.
5. Safe Food Alliance. (2020). Food Safety Culture. https://safefoodalliance.com/?s=Food+safety+culture.