How To Foster a Fantastic Food Safety Culture

By Laura Dunn Nelson, Alchemy Systems

Food safety culture has been a popular phrase lately. Most would agree that it’s an important concept, but how do we actually build one and strengthen it? A company’s food safety culture is determined in large part by the strength of its food safety program – one can’t prosper without the other. The critical cog between these two are people – their ability to consistently perform the necessary behaviors to execute a successful food safety program. With a focus on frontline employees and their food safety roles, we’ve identified some common obstacles, several of which are discussed in detail in the 2016 Global Food Safety Training Survey¹, that could slow the successful implementation of your food safety program on the plant floor and hurt any efforts to drive a strong food safety culture.

• Training materials are too complex. The food industry workforce is extremely diverse, and employees span a wide range of education levels, cultures, and language preferences. What’s easy for one employee to understand may be difficult for another. By trying to present large amounts of critical information into one training session, we can overload employees with too much information resulting in their inability to retain key learnings.