Building up a Food Safety Culture Climate in the Food Industry

Over the last few years, food safety culture has become more and more important, with explicit chapters in GFSI standards and new legislation.

Food safety culture is a key element in ensuring the roll-out of a food safety system to the floor and guaranteeing the commitment of all members of personnel to achieve a food-safe product.

Nevertheless, food safety culture is not something you just decree or generate with a magic wand. At BENEO Orafti, we produce high-quality ingredients intended for the most sensitive markets, like infant formulas. Our teams have been thinking for years about how to build up a climate that would take all our operators to an appropriate level of awareness and consciousness of Food Safety. 

Therefore, we have based the generation of this climate on three pillars:

1. A Strong Quality System: The aim here is to give a frame to the day-to-day operations, streamlining the activities. With a good description of the expected level of action, registration, and follow-up, we can guarantee operators know what to do. This gives them the right level of competencies to avoid improvisation and mistakes and guarantees the quality of our products.

2. Monitoring of signals: Of course, things can go wrong! But it is part of our quality DNA to see each incident as an opportunity for improvement. Each non-conformity, deviation, or customer feedback can teach us a lot about how to finetune our system and make sure we avoid repetition of those. Using root cause analysis, KPI, trends follow-up, and reporting with collaborative working groups helps to define long-term solutions and collective reflection. It is also very important that this is presented in a positive way, encouraging open notification and sharing of findings without making anybody feel guilty.

3. Social Context: Culture is all about people! You can have the best system in place; it will always be carried out by individuals. This means we had to find ways to raise awareness and make people believe in the importance of what they do. 

Food safety culture is a key element to ensure the roll-out of a food safety system to the floor and guarantee commitment of all members of personnel to achieve a food safe product.

For this, the first milestone comes from the management at any level; a role model is necessary – you can only have your people following the rules if you are leading by example. A second milestone comes with training: make people understand what they have to do, and they will commit much more. And finally, communicate regularly, both on successes and on incidents. With a good balance of competencies, skills, and information, the climate will gradually improve, and people will start to talk and share, generating a food safety culture.

Only when these three pillars are combined in a well-balanced way can you observe a positive evolution in the food safety climate you want to install? And this without acting explicitly on a diffuse concept nobody can force.

As we said, “The day an operator dares to address his manager to highlight a better way to respect hygiene rules, then our food safety culture is a success.”

Since a good year, we have launched a new charter to sensitize our personnel and favor hygienic behaviors. This was presented months ago and linked with monthly concrete activities run on the floor with operators – a humoristic video, a report on complaints, a speaker describing the importance of Food Safety in their market - and we see a clear trend in the feedback obtained from our operators. More importantly – the floor operators themselves now come to quality with ideas for actions and activities.

We also identified a number of soft indicators, listing initiatives, proposals, suggestions, and volunteering in the auditing team, which clearly show how food safety is evolving without running heavy surveys.

Using this approach, without even knowing food safety culture would become such a big thing in the current standards, we managed to combine existing elements of our quality management to make it a motivating tool, with positive outcomes also in terms of efficiency, personnel involvement, cost management, and continuous improvement!