Maple Leaf Foods Reduces Safety Incident Rate By 60 Percent

After a breach in food safety, Maple Leaf Foods was challenged to improve its food and workplace safety, as well as to create a safety of food culture companywide. This case study shows how Maple Leaf Foods applied custom training, coaching, and communications programs to achieve its food safety goals.

Several years ago, Maple Leaf Foods experienced a disastrous breach in food safety, “We had a tragic incident where people lost their lives from eating our food,” says Lone Jespersen, Director of Food Safety. “We diagnosed our safety culture and realized we needed to do something different.” It was clear that all operations needed to align with Maple Leaf’s corporate commitment to create a culture of food and worker safety.

But creating a common, shared safety culture was daunting because Maple Leaf had acquired many other companies over the years. “We’ve purchased 32 sub-cultures all with different ways of behaving and valuing what we do at Maple Leaf,” says Jespersen. Instead of managing 32 unique cultures, Maple Leaf needed to align all operations under one common goal of achieving a sustainable food and workplace safety culture.