Ten Ways to Enhance the Management of Your Food Safety Culture

Competitive Advantage

To establish food safety culture, companies must invest in systems that enhance commitment, competence, and communication among all levels of their staff. This investment can drive widespread benefits in any company, building process compliance to better control safety, quality, and cost.

Laura Wildey, a Food Safety Specialist, indicates that consumers are now more likely to choose companies that promote their food safety culture and demonstrate a public commitment to curb food-borne illness.

A 2022 study of 80 North American food industry professionals shows that investment in food safety culture can create a competitive advantage.

GFSI was founded by the world's largest retailers to harmonize food safety standards against one international benchmark. When implemented properly, GFSI standards ensure safe food for consumers - thereby protecting retail brands - while also saving retail buyers the time of evaluating many region- or commodity-specific standards.

For these reasons and more, GFSI has become increasingly prominent. Most major retailers actively participate in GFSI's governance coalition, and many major retailers require GFSI-recognized certifications to be approved as a vendor. When major retailers conduct audits of their vendors, many will use GFSI requirements to evaluate food safety culture.

Certification Requirements

Overarching Standards

In 2018, GFSI published its position paper, "A Culture of Food Safety," which sparked one of the industry's biggest shifts. While many GFSI-recognized certifications were inherently built around a premise of food safety culture, this shift established new, firm, and specific requirements for certification audits.

To meet certification requirements, companies must define their values and roles, create supporting policies and procedures, and implement records that track those in action. Companies' records should produce key metrics. Combined with continuous employee feedback, the metrics should guide continuous improvement in food safety culture, with specific scoring thresholds defined for specific management actions.

Draw metrics out of all records. Create dashboards and scorecards for your key metrics, and make those visible for all employees. Discuss your measured performance in all regular meetings, and outline improvement objectives in your written quality policy.
Track who discovers safety deviations and reward those employees in your regular meetings.
Stretch out your food safety training for employees. It's not a one-time thing, but an ongoing deliverable that should be readily accessible while they're doing work.
Structure food safety training as a quiz, so you can trend your training scores as a KPI for staff competence. Create clear SOPs for follow-ups based on scoring thresholds.
Do regular facility walk-throughs daily or weekly, to demonstrate you understand what's actually happening on the production floor. Ensure leaders such as the GMs or plant managers join often.
Allow employees to submit feedback anonymously. This ensures they feel safe sharing observations, good or bad.
Structure employee feedback with a numerical survey template, so you can trend your scores as a KPI for staff sentiment. Create clear SOPs for follow-ups based on scoring thresholds.

Improve Your Metrics

When companies use paper records, data must be duplicated into a digital system to produce metrics for dashboards and scorecards. This is not only inefficient, but regularly out-of-date, preventing real-time measurement and response.

When companies use spreadsheets for records, non-technical operators may struggle to quickly capture data from the floor, and metrics may be undermined by typos or accidental breaks in exposed formulas.

Clean digital records should be configured in software with corresponding instructions, reminders, and rules, helping operators to enter clean data for metrics. Data submitted in records should automatically flow into fully configurable reports, producing real-time scorecards and dashboards custom to your KPIs.

Enhance Operator Understanding

It's estimated that 20% of food workers in the U.S. speak English as a second language. If your food safety documentation is English-only, language barriers may limit operator competence.

It's also common to post laminated policies and procedures on office walls. While this creates some visibility, most operators won't leave the field or the floor to look up help, which can lead to many avoidable mistakes. When instructions and help are delivered verbally, companies also limit the documented communication they have available for audits.

In a strong digital system, you can streamline instructions, rules, and translation to build compliace.

Clarify Team Roles and Ongoing Responsibilities

Most companies have dozens of time-sensitive record templates that need to be completed regularly. If staff rely on memory or continuous verbal reminders, there will likely be missing data and incomplete procedures, hampering collaboration for food safety culture.

Companies can streamline their task management with a unified FSQA calendar that is directly linked into records. This should automate reminders and alerts, creating clear responsibilities, and streamlining collaborative workflows.

Author

Amy Wayne

Provision Analytics

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