Based on my personal experience, I will say the mayor burden for food safety is MANAGEMENT COMMINTMENT. If you see all GFSi schemes starts withManagement Commitment because they recognize this the single most importantelement for any safety program to work.
With that said, one of the reasons for lack of management commitment is of course MONEY, if they can’t see the cost/benefit of safety, is hard for them to put time, money and other resources on it.
I have the opportunity to audit, see and compare several operations of the SAME company, with the SAME programs and SAME resources, same PRODUCT, everything the same but different LOCAL managers, and there are huge differences in the way Food Safety is handled. After doing some root cause analysis the conclusion for the difference is solely MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT. Manager who understand the importance of Food Safety and are really committed, use their resources (whichin this case, again, are the same) to maintain a solid FS program, while the ones that think on Food Safety as a waste of time and money just do the minimun just to get along with what they have to do.
The impressive thing about this is that the management attitude spreads very quickly among supervisors and employees, a Manager that lacks interest in cleaning and food safety results on employees that have the same approach, and backwards.
Edited by Antores, 02 September 2011 - 05:24 PM.