Food Safety Culture

“Food safety culture – shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mind-set and behaviour toward food safety in, across and throughout an organisation.” GFSI 2018

Food safety research states that food safety culture maturity can be attributed/measured by five key areas within an organisation.

These are:

  • Communication (between employees)
  • Enabling conditions (company rules)
  • Organisational attitudes (compatible food safety values between QA team and management)
  • Company vision (vision compatible with food safety)
  • Food safety priorities (people, training, health & safety).

Resources:

  • CODEX HACCP Revision 2020: by FPSC Board Director and managing director of Quality Associates, Dr Andreas Klieber, on revisions to the CODEX HACCP. More here.
  • CODEX General Principles of Food Hygiene Revision 2020: More here.
  • Recipe for Success: One Harvest’s Approach: by FPSC Board Director and Head of Technical at OneHarvest, Dr Sharon Jones, in FSANZ’s Food Safety Culture Connections Autumn 2020  issue. More here.
  • Food Safety Governance Guide: It’s not a QA Role: guest industry blog by Dr Barry McGookin from FIAL (14 September 2020). More here.
  • The Challenge of a Food Safety Culture: a blog by guest industry contributor Dianne Fullelove, on the challenges of developing a strong food safety culture (30 Jun 2020). More here.
  • A Culture of Food Safety: A position paper from the Global Food Safety Initiative (4 Nov 2018). More here.
  • Food Safety Culture in New Zealand Food Businesses: The New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries released a research report on food safety culture with food business decision-makers and staff (5 Jul 2018). More here.
  • New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre Seminar: The New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre will be hosting a seminar on food safety culture (3 Dec 2021). More here.

Understanding Food Safety Culture: The Centre is attempting to better understand food safety culture in the Australian and New Zealand fresh produce sector.

Food safety culture is human, as such it wholly depends upon the subjective attitudes of management and staff.

The 2019 panel discussion between Barbara Wilson, Food Safety Consultant; Elizabeth Frankish, PhD Student, UTAS/USYD; Tundra Howe, Harvest Moon and Jessica Purbrick, FPSC A-NZ led the audience through the challenges of identifying culture, implementation and measurement.

Jargon such as the use of the word ‘culture’ is a barrier to understanding what it is and how it can be improved along with perceived lack of senior management involvement or direction around the importance of this theme.

The Global Survey of Food Safety highlighted the top three reasons businesses implemented food safety practices:

  1. Safeguard the health of consumers
  2. Comply with laws and regulations
  3. As a prerequisite for good business, not a competitive advantage.

Within this study, the number one threat to “good business” was management and staff attitudes around food safety. And the top businesses demonstrated that developing a strong food safety culture was an effective action to mitigate risk and used this as a control to their strategies and reputation.

A 2019 survey of the fresh produce industry in Australia and New Zealand found 90% of businesses believed they had strong food safety culture however commented that production pressure takes priority over procedures that address food safety.

Other keys points:

  • A misfit between management and the QA workforce/staff
  • Food safety is a tick-box exercise that needs broader team buy-in

The Centre is collaborating with the Australian dairy and red meat sectors to undertake more work in this area to help businesses realise the opportunities of robust food safety culture and its relationship to business continuity, along with creating consistent language and a how-to can-do food safety culture model.