What is Food Safety Culture after all?
I consulted some experts during a literature review to discover what is being said about Food Safety Culture…
Food Safety Culture refers to the specific culture of a facility in relation to food safety matters: the attitudes, beliefs, practices, and values that determine what is happening when no one is watching. If you want to gauge a site’s Food Safety Culture, try asking yourself how the site typically responds to food safety concerns. Does the staff take potential problem seriously, as if its importance is obvious? Or do they view food safety practices as just one more hoop they need to jump through in order to stay in business? Is their response to simply ask, “How much is this going to cost?”
Safe Food Alliance
Organizational work culture is to do with groups of people (not individuals alone) within a business, how they interact, what an organization is about and how they behave. Food handlers can only be as hygienic as the business and the leadership within it requires, allows and encourages them to be and this is influenced by the facilities provided as well as the management systems and culture in place.
Professor Chris Griffith
The GFSI TWG defines food safety cultures as, “shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mindset and behaviour toward food safety in, across and throughout an organization.” The definition is derived from existing literature on organizational and food safety culture and made practical and applicable through the group’s work.
GFSI
Food safety culture in a food business is how everyone (owners, managers, employees) thinks and acts in their daily job to make sure the food they make or serve is safe. It’s about having pride in producing safe food every time, recognising that a good quality product must be safe to eat. Food safety is your top priority. A strong food safety culture comes from people understanding the importance of making safe food and committing to doing whatever it takes, every time. It starts at the top but needs everyone’s support across the business.
Food Standards Australia
Within the food industry, food safety culture can be described as the “prevailing attitudes, values and practices related to food safety that are taught, directly and indirectly, to new employees”
Dr. Joanne Taylor
Food safety culture is not just a slogan or a communication campaign, but it’s a way of doing business based on the science of human behavior and organizational culture, which is an evolving and expanding science in and of itself.
The reality is that a strong food safety culture is almost always a subset of the broader organizational culture. A strong commitment to food safety usually flows from the organization’s values and beliefs that align with caring for others. An organization that has a strong safety culture conveys that it’s an organization that truly cares about people, their customers and their employees
Frank Yiannas
“A culture of food safety is built on a set of shared values that the operators and their staff follow to produce and provide food in the safest manner”
Powell et al
