Why businesses need a strong food safety culture
Foodborne illness risks remain a concern for the industry, both in terms of consumer safety and potential damage to food businesses. Expert Francine L. Shaw shares tips on building a culture that prioritizes food safety.
Salad kits, cantaloupe, stone fruits and other produce have recently been recalled due to food safety risks, including Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes. Foodborne illness risks remain a huge concern in our industry, as any safety breaches can jeopardize consumer safety and cause significant financial, legal and reputational damage to food businesses.
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It’s critical to build a strong, positive food safety culture where employees prioritize food safety and demonstrate a commitment through their actions and values. There are many significant benefits to building and maintaining a positive food safety culture. For instance, it will help you:
- Reduce foodborne illness risks — Every food business must prioritize food safety and minimize risks, which can sicken customers and damage your reputation. Having a food safety culture empowers employees to follow proper protocols, take ownership of food safety efforts, speak up about potential problems and reduce risks.
- Prevent recalls — Food and beverage recalls recently reached a five-year high. Food businesses pay an average of $10 million per recall in direct costs, including retrieving and destroying recalled products, as well as lost sales, legal fees and brand damage. Other repercussions can include negative press coverage, loss of consumer confidence, etc. Having a strong food safety culture can help prevent recalls by prioritizing food safety, ensuring high quality foods, following proper protocols, staying compliant, etc.
- Optimize operations — Creating a positive food safety culture can help improve business performance by elevating operational efficiency, optimizing processes, increasing productivity and more. Additionally, this effort can help your team reduce risks — and the associated financial, legal and reputational damage of food safety breaches.
- Comply with ever-changing regulations and standards — Food businesses must stay aware of — and compliant with — food safety regulations and standards, which often vary by location and evolve over time. These rules, which are designed to protect foods, consumers and businesses, are important to understand and follow. Keeping up with these rules and regulations is integral to achieving and maintaining proper safety certifications and accreditations.
- Increase key metrics — Implementing a strong food safety culture can increase key metrics, including customer sales, satisfaction, trust, loyalty and referrals. Since customers expect and demand safe, high-quality food, they’re more likely to visit, trust and recommend companies that demonstrate an unwavering commitment to food safety. Being forthcoming and transparent about your company’s food safety efforts can help differentiate your organization from the competition, drive traffic and increase sales in a crowded marketplace.
Promoting a food safety culture involves adopting modern industry practices like minimizing chemical reliance, leveraging innovative technologies, embracing sustainability and fostering forward-thinking leadership.
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Your business would be wise to:
- Train your team — Employees can’t be expected to follow the rules if they don’t know what the rules are. Regularly train your employees about things like temperature control, food safety protocols, personal hygiene, food safety regulations, etc. Provide regular, ongoing food safety training to ensure that all employees understand (and follow) proper protocols.
- Explain why the rules are in place — Employees are more likely to follow the proper protocols if they understand why these efforts matter. Therefore, don’t just tell employees to use a “kill step” on produce. Explain the purpose of the kill step, and provide effective, food-safe disinfectants and sanitizers for this effort. Ensure that your team understands what could happen if they don’t follow proper safety procedures — e.g., sickening customers, losing consumer trust, damaging your brand’s reputation, etc.
- Rely on tech tools — Tech tools like artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet-connected devices are game changers, elevating food safety efforts, boosting transparency and allowing company leaders to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Tech tools also help improve risk awareness, so potential food safety issues can be immediately corrected.
- Use the right sanitizers and disinfectants — Not all sanitizers and disinfectants are created equally, so ensure you’re using the most effective, safe and sustainable options. Use products like Hypochlorous acid, also known as HOCL, which is 80-100 times more powerful than bleach and effective at killing 99.99% of pathogens, as well as sustainable, chemical-free and safe for humans, foods and the environment. Companies like EcoloxTech offer cost-effective HOCL solutions that are becoming increasingly popular in foodservice settings and can be used directly on ready-to-eat foods like fruits and vegetables. HOCL from Ecoloxtech systems has been cleared by the EPA as a no-post-rinse required sanitizer that helps improve shelf life and reduce water consumption and expensive labor costs.
- Make food safety a core value — Make food safety part of your company’s core values. That means prioritizing food safety over everything else, including sales and production numbers. Safety and quality should be part of your company’s overall vision and values. Food safety protocols must be more than just written procedures stored in the back of a file cabinet and instead be a mindset and attitude that’s engrained into all daily functions. Managers must lead by example and walk the walk when it comes to food safety.
- Reward high performers — Spotlight employees who are doing the right thing. Praise them in staff meetings and feature them on your website and social media platforms. Pick a food safety employee of the month. Provide small gifts or financial bonuses to team members that go above and beyond. Showing sincere appreciation will help motivate employees to keep prioritizing safety initiatives.
Here are the keys to success: Create a strong food safety culture, train and educate employees about the importance of food safety and how to follow gold standard protocols, give them the right tools (like properly functioning equipment, well-calibrated food thermometers, effective sanitizers and disinfectants, tech tools, etc.) and empower employees to take ownership of food safety efforts.
Emphasize that food safety is everyone’s responsibility. Teamwork makes the dream work when it comes to creating and maintaining a food safety culture.
Francine L. Shaw is a food safety specialist, co-host of “Don’t Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast,” founder of Savvy Food Safety, co-founder of My Trusted Source, author of “Who Watches the Kitchen?” and an entrepreneur and speaker who spent 30-plus years working in the foodservice industry. Her career has included performing services (operating partner, corporate and private trainer, health inspector, third-party inspector, adjunct professor) in various sectors of the foodservice industry. She has written hundreds of articles for national trade magazines and appeared on “Dr. Oz,” the BBC World Series Radio and iHeart Radio as a food safety expert.