I answered "Yes, a strong one."
This has absolutely nothing to do with me! Even though I posted recently about the lack of audits performed while the company had no quality manager for a year, senior management was absolutely not aware of that situation and had, in fact, made sure the audits were being performed for the first several months of no quality manager.
The reason we have a strong food safety culture is the amount of Quality and Food Safety experience we have in our Senior operations managers. The President and Senior Director were both quality managers. Aside from that, they are committed to protecting the brand and our customers brands, which means protecting the customer. They see the correlation, and have no problems (so far) backing me on changing things that have been normal operations without a question. In three weeks, we've discussed and changed how smocks are separated from street clothes, the amount of focus on floor and trash personnel and their separation from the line and line workers, and even went to a metal detectable zip tie that cost 10x as much, even though they haven't had a problem with the white, non-metal detectable ones (yet!). I am very lucky.
At my previous company (very large), senior management pushed food safety culture down, but they pushed down numbers more frequently. Weekly calls were 90% efficiencies and variances, and 10% quality, customer focus, and food safety items. At the plant level, at every plant I was at, there was a huge divide between quality and operations. I'm not proud of how I always handled myself, but I did the best I could with the relationship we all had.
Sorry for the long response. I just know my situation is unique, and I'm happy to be here. When I presented my first facilities audit in a meeting, I was expecting some backlash, but instead the senior team remarked on how ridiculous it was that people walked past what I had documented everyday without it being solved. I was speechless for the first time in my career!