Challenge Your Food-Manufacturing Workforce To Embrace HACCP

By Laurel Maloy, contributing writer, Food Online

The HACCP Mentor in Australia has issued a challenge to the food industry. Don’t let it go unanswered.

Amanda Evans, known as the HACCP mentor in Australia, has provided invaluable information in the past. Now she’s throwing down the gauntlet and challenging everyone to get involved.

In actuality, this is a no-brainer when it comes to embracing Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) within your facilities. Click here to join and each week, for the next 50 weeks, Evans will provide a challenge, as well as direction on how to implement it. Evans has an unparalleled passion for and understanding of HACCP; and she doesn’t mind sharing. The challenge begins next week.

So how do you get the challenged started? First, get management and employees involved to make it fun. Though completely educational, most employees cannot resist a challenge, so provide an incentive. The motivation can be as simple or as elaborate as you choose. Tickets to a sporting event, dinner at a local restaurant, an “HACCP Expert” parking spot, movie tickets, or a gift card are all good incentives. In fact, sometimes it is as simple as giving praise or recognition for a job well done, in front of the entire workforce. 

Through this process you will discover the managers and employees with not only a passion for their job, but with the desire to make a difference. The reward will serve to get them thinking and the challenge will keep them going. You will also, hopefully, be inundated with value-added ways by which to develop and maintain a culture of food safety within your organization. You and your company will be rewarded with a more well-informed workforce, as well as encouraging a cohesion that can be hard to achieve without meaningful conversation.   

Evans has set up both an Instagram and Twitter account (#FSHChallenge) so everyone can keep up to date. She is inviting all who participate to engage in conversation, share information, and post photos of the implementation process.

The world is actually a pretty small place, made even more so with social media and technology. What a great way to reach out across your plant, across the nation, or around the world in a common effort to improve the global food supply… and participation is free.