9 replies to this topic

[Simon]

A positive food safety culture is the goal, but living it every day can be challenging. From training to management buy-in, from paperwork to frontline habits, the gaps often show up in unexpected places.

 

Which part do you think is the hardest to get right?

[Shamik]

The hardest part of building a positive food safety culture, in my experience, is ensuring that the desired food safety behaviors actually get lived out every day on the frontline. Training and management buy-in are important, but translating those into consistent habits under real production pressures is the toughest challenge. Often, despite best efforts, old habits resurface, especially when there are time constraints, high employee turnover, or unclear expectations.

 

From what I’ve seen, the real test of a food safety culture is how effectively it shapes micro-decisions and actions by frontline workers, even when they’re under stress or pushing to meet output targets. Without strong, visible leadership commitment and ongoing reinforcement, the culture easily becomes just another compliance checkbox rather than a lived value.

 

So, although paperwork, training, and policies are critical, I believe the biggest gap—and hardest part to get right—is embedding food safety as a core value that genuinely guides everyday behavior throughout the organization.

[Mathieu Colmant]

I work with (very) small and large structures. 

Small structures, like family businesses, often have a strong FSC in place for years. But they can not prove it, and documentation needed for that is quite impressive.

The larger the structure, the more work there is to do to build an FSC. In that case documentation becomes a smaller problem than management commitment, which is needed but not often done.

[GMO]

I think culture is widely misunderstood.  An ok food safety culture can exist with poor commitment from the top but it's far harder.

 

Everything after that follows.

 

Operators not doing what they should?  I bet their managers only say well done if they get good volume out of the door or even hide food safety issues.  Leaders set the tone for that.

 

Documentation a problem?  Almost certainly it's either not resourced properly or all the onus sits on one Technical function with food safety not owned more widely.  Leaders hold the purse strings and set the tone for cross departmental working.

 

Training is far too often there to tick a box.  That's either for GFSI or so that someone can be disciplined later for not following it.  If you genuinely get under the skin of most training programmes it does little to reassure you it's actually supporting the team to do the right thing and what's worse, most Leaders know it.  They know that a lot of their staff don't speak the language they're training something in, yet are paying lip service to getting it right.  Or worse still, training people in processes they've never bothered to check are achievable.

 

All of it is important but it takes some awesome middle management to stand up to leaders and set a different tone if things are not being led as they should.  Sadly I'm certain this is why so many Technical people burn out and leave.

Edited by GMO, 16 September 2025 - 10:11 AM.

[Carol88]

I feel the hardest part is building the plan to start and then measuring it. Does anyone have a good plan that they could share with me please. 

[GMO]

I feel the hardest part is building the plan to start and then measuring it. Does anyone have a good plan that they could share with me please. 

 

Anything anyone shares with you should be bespoke to them.  Stop foodborne illness have some good resources though:  The Food Safety Culture Toolkit | Alliance to STOP

[GMO]

Actually, thinking about it Simon, perhaps the hardest part for most sites is understanding what culture is, believing it to be worth improving (or knowing your motivation for improving it) then knowing where to get started.  There are some decent resources out there and also some BS ones.  But also too many businesses are only doing this due to GFSI and would drop it like a hot stone if it somehow got removed.

 

I always find this baffling because in health and safety, people don't talk about whether behaviour or culture is important but how or why it's important.  There are conflicting schools of thought on how to approach it all but nobody doubts that behaviours and culture are absolutely key to safety incidents.  The literature is littered with them.  Yet it feels like in food safety we just have different people who look at similar outputs yet think the health and safety experts have, I guess, just got it all wrong.  It feels like I'm one of the few that really think this is completely valid and it makes our lives harder.

 

I'll give an example.  One place I worked, people were SO GOOD at stage managing audits that every day was a stage management.  But because we didn't have the resources we needed for food safety, we were constantly fire fighting and having product holds related to machines which were long past replacement.  Our audit scores were fantastic, our results were not.  We had a withdrawal in my time there I argued should have been a public recall and was shouted down.  We even managed to squeeze the senior leaders into some spending to replace some of the broken equipment but they wouldn't invest in the training to make sure it was used properly.

 

A poor culture just means you're chasing your tail every single day and burning out.  It's torturous.  

 

I see it in other organisations too. 

 

"I'm only doing this because BRCGS tells me to." 

 

"I'll pick up any old survey to tick the box or make an in house one on MS Forms." 

 

"I'll do a "food safety week" event in the canteen"

 

FSC plan box ticked.  But no behaviours changed.

[jfrey123]

Originally voted both Management Commitment and Document Overload.  I've complained already about how SQF in particular is a bit inconsistent in how they want FSC to be 'documented' so I won't beat that dead horse anymore.

 

But Management Commitment just reared its ugly head again in my corp.  Two of our sites are USDA regulated producing meat appetizer type items.  One former QA manager who was promoted to corporate QA director level over both sites decided to "help" his original plant's manager save costs by allowing them to discontinue/disallow smocks and foot coverings for all QA techs and management entering the production room.  Done without informing our VP of FSQA, who is working to get all of our sites under an umbrella corporate FSQMS where all of our sites will have the same general guidelines implemented throughout our environment.  Needless to say, their site is immediately back to the old ways, if for no other reason than to ensure the production staff doesn't start to bicker about why GMP's apply to them but not the other people in the room.

 

So we can call it Management Commitment, but really there's just a human factor of stup... lack of intelligent foresight when blinded by incorporating cost savings over food safety.

[MDaleDDF]

I work with (very) small and large structures. 

Small structures, like family businesses, often have a strong FSC in place for years. But they can not prove it, and documentation needed for that is quite impressive.

The larger the structure, the more work there is to do to build an FSC. In that case documentation becomes a smaller problem than management commitment, which is needed but not often done.

I agree, and am happy I work at a smaller place.   It makes it way easier, imho.

[GMO]

I agree, and am happy I work at a smaller place.   It makes it way easier, imho.

 

I've experienced both and I would have said the same until talking to an old colleague from a small place.  It made me realise that it wasn't that the culture was better, it was just it was easier to police and directly influence.  The same problems with lack of ownership or worse happened at senior levels and in Operations leadership, just when I was in a small place I knew everyone by name and my shadow cast more than theirs did (I was in the factory a hell of a lot more for a start).  So to start off with I policed people with my team (into submission lol...) but later I got into the heads of the middle management in a way they'd challenge up.  Thing was it wasn't sustainable.  When I left, they lost their ally who would back them to the hilt and were left with the guys who didn't care.  Guess what?  Not only have they had food safety but some serious health and safety issues since.  Isn't it often the way the two go hand in hand?