Bertrand Emond, Head of Membership & Training at Campden BRI, explains how companies can achieve excellence in food safety culture training programmes.
The GFSI Food Safety Culture Position Paper defines food safety culture as ‘shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mindset and behaviour toward food safety in, across and throughout an organisation’. Food safety is a shared responsibility and all employees have a role to play. Employees, irrespective of their position within the company, need to understand how their actions can have an impact (positive or negative) on food safety. To ensure the right behaviours at all times, each employee needs to have been trained properly; they need to know exactly what is expected of them, what the right thing to do is, how to do things right and crucially what the consequences are to them directly and to the company of not doing the right thing!
Companies also need to bear in mind that training is one of 20 dimensions that they need to address to drive a strong food safety culture – as described in the GFSI position paper and in the Culture Excellence model. So, in the case of a near miss or incident, it is critical to carry out a thorough root cause analysis to determine the real reasons why the person behaved in that way; far too often, we see ‘re-training’ as the sole corrective action.
