Professor Emeritus Chris Griffith, from the University of Wales, recently visited SA to spread the word on what and how to implement a food culture in the food industry.
According to the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), if you don’t know what food safety culture is then it’s time you found out as soon as possible. This was the focus at this year’s Global Food Safety Initiative’s (GFSI) 10th annual meeting held in London in February, which was attended by 745 delegates from over 60 countries around the world. The conference explored the topic of food safety culture and how to create this within the food industry.
An interest in food safety culture started to become evident about two-three years ago and since then has increased rapidly. The UK’s level four hygiene exams (the highest /most advanced food safety qualification) now require that managers answer questions on how they would assess and improve the ‘food safety culture’ within their businesses.
A book, written and published in 2010, was the first peer-reviewed papers dealing exclusively with food safety culture. However, possibly of an even greater significance and importance was the reporting of food safety culture as a causative factor in food-poisoning outbreaks.
In 2009 an Ecoli outbreak inquiry report in South Wales was published, closely followed by a report on the Canadian Maple leaf Listeriosis outbreak. Inquiries into both outbreaks were were set up to examine the causes and both concluded that the food safety culture within the businesses was the problem.
The operational food safety performance/hygiene practices of employees is obviously closely related to the food safety management systems used within a business and these must be appropriately constructed. These systems specify what employees should do in terms of food safety practices, but a great misgiving is that they do not ensure they are being implemented. It is the interaction of the management systems with the prevailing food safety culture that determines the operational food safety performance.
So what is food safety culture? One of the most widely-accepted definitions and one used at the GFSI conference is that it is ‘the aggregation of the prevailing relatively constant, learned, shared attitudes, values and beliefs contributing to the hygiene behaviours used in a particular food handling environment.’
This definition tries to encompass, in a relatively simple way, the range of complex issues contributing to a food safety culture. There are a few key points to note: this culture represents the collective attitudes, values and beliefs held by many food handlers and not individuals and, furthermore, it is a culture that ought to be learnt by new employees and has a direct impact on systems implementation. Another point to note is that every business should have a food safety culture record somewhere. However, managers should know although they probably do not what this is and the factors that contribute to it. Any business’s food safety culture will lie on a continuum from very positive to very negative. Towards the centre of this continuum lies a neutral point and this is often a characteristic of the culture found in many larger businesses. Such companies have become complacent with their systems believing them to be all that is required to produce safe food. This complacency has, possibly in part, been fostered by the drive over the past few years towards improving management systems to get external accreditation and the belief that a set of papers/documents is all that is needed to produce safe food.
I believe that food safety culture is only going to attract more attention in the next couple of years, especially as external standards require a lot more evidence of management commitment to food safety procedures.
Having lectured on this topic to numerous boards of directors and top management teams worldwide, including Von Holy Consulting, one of the leading training providers in South Africa, I have devised a unique training seminar exclusive for SA food businesses. Delegates will not only learn about the composition of their business’s food safety culture but also that their own food safety leadership style – one of the main factors contributing to culture – is imperative to the whole system.
