I agree. Culture has been weakly audited. I don't think the standard was bad but the auditing was utterly inconsistent. For sites that took it seriously, culture definitely improved. When v8 came out I was already about 5 years into trying to get behavioural food safety to be a "thing" in the sites I worked in so for me it was absolutely vital. It's taken a lot of persuading of others but the sites where I implemented change are now getting audit scores way ahead of those in the same group that haven't. Audits aren't everything for sure but they're an indicator. In that time we went from having about 10 significant food safety incidents a year (without making it to recall or withdrawal) to none. Other sites in the group have had recalls and withdrawals in that time. Same business, same top level senior leadership.
I had one auditor though who looked at the fact we had monthly SLT meetings and didn't even want to see the agenda. Then said we'd covered food safety culture, despite the fact I had a three year plan and could evidence what we'd done with photos etc. Didn't want to see it. Then another auditor go into great detail, including what expertise I'd sought. He admitted in the end we were the only site he'd not given a non conformance to but he gave us a right grilling. A third auditor, I mentioned who I'd worked with directly on food safety culture, he knew the name and then went into some massive monologue about how their certification body had done some work with them and barely checked the plan.
So when you've put real effort into it, it's disappointing to see that other sites may be getting away with very little. That said though, the reason I'm putting effort into it is I believe it's the future of food safety and because if you do put effort into it, it pays off. H&S teams have not been banging on about behaviours for decades for no reason and there is so much overlap. In part because of that approach, now I'd say in the UK anyway it's pretty typical to find operations people who are passionate about health and safety (less so 20-30 years ago) but the comparative attitude on food safety is not as prevalent. That's why it's so important. Until food safety starts becoming everyone's job and stops being a functional role, we will have the repeat incidents we have. What I find disappointing is even if it's weakly audited right now, it doesn't stop all of us here saying to ourselves, "I don't care... I'm going to make this happen."
