Building a Food Safety Culture: Empowerment to the People

An automatic handwashing station and signage remind GTI staff that a food safety culture is mandatory. Photo courtesy of GTI.

Empowerment, measurement, and recognition

When employees have a voice, they become part of the solution, according to Joni Fagan, vice president of quality control at Ken’s Foods. “Food safety is everyone’s responsibility,” she says. “This is included in job descriptions, training, and specific job tasks. Expectations of food safety culture become behaviors.” 

Leadership buy-in and continuous support of the food safety culture is mandatory, Fagan adds. Ken’s Foods fosters an environment of collaboration, where staff listens and enlists the help and knowledge of the workforce.

In the cannabis edibles industry, it’s important to build a food safety culture that the leadership team embraces by showing and presenting expectations themselves before rolling out the program to hourly workers, says Wendy Uhls, quality and compliance manager for Green Thumb Industries (GTI). “We’ve actually implemented some new roles recently, where hourly workers own more of the quality piece, are able to provide feedback up through the chain, and own that space,” she says.

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Uhls’ facility also uses a “best buds” program. “Whenever we catch somebody doing an awesome job of complying or just being a supportive member of the team, we provide coins that employees can collect over time,” she says. Depending on the number of coins they acquire, employees can choose from an array of goodies, such as hats, shirts, and GTI products.

GTI’s Janet Sullivan, quality compliance manager at a Florida facility, has implemented a quality and food safety presentation board, where the company presents a new food safety topic each month. “Last month, we refreshed the GMP [good manufacturing practice] policy for the whole plant and put a copy of the GMP policy up with the training that we had done in PowerPoint,” she explains. “Every month, we’ll do a different topic just to get the team involved.” 

Smithfield invites employees to “audit” the products they’ve helped produce. Cross-functional teams of staff representing all levels of the organization are invited to appraise products daily. This program underscores how critical safety and quality standards are and instills a sense of employee ownership.

Through its “Raise Your Hand” campaign, Smithfield empowers employees to stop production if they see anything throughout the day that affects food safety or quality. The company recognizes employees who identify potential product safety or quality hazards.

At Smithfield, employees learn from day one that food safety is non-negotiable. The company’s goal is zero product recalls, which it achieved in 2019. As a vertically integrated company, Smithfield is collaborating with FoodLogiQ’s Food Industry Blockchain Consortium and the IBM Food Trust to drive customer visibility into food safety and quality assurance, and to increase transparency. 

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GTI measures customer complaints using key performance indicator (KPI) boards. “We’re looking at customer complaints, third-party audits, and our Department of Health inspections, so we’re taking all of those, and we try to present those every month,” says Sullivan. “We don’t want to have any findings from the Department of Health, and we don’t want to have any GMP findings. We want to make sure that our customers are happy, so we try to get customer complaints down to zero.”

Currently, GTI facilities are preparing for SQF certification. Learn more about GTI’s food safety culture in the sidebar below. 

Image courtesy of The Acheson Group (TAG) and Safetychain. FSMA Fridays, “Building an Auditable, Measurable Food Safety Culture.”

According to Casal-Wardle, measuring the culture is not about checking your critical control points and then thinking you’re finished. “That’s great,” she says, “but look at how the people are managing it. Look at how they’re doing it. Are they doing it on time? Is it something that is consistently being done? Because that shows you where you are in the culture model.” 

Casal-Wardle also discussed the culture parodies of task-based and role-based programs during the FSMA Fridays webinar conducted by TAG and Safetychain on “Building an Auditable, Measurable Food Safety Culture.”

 “A task-based culture is a matrix driven by work,” she explained. “People are related in that culture through the work they do.” In contrast, she said, a role-based culture is driven by hierarchy and its chain of command.

“A task-based culture is collaborative,” she continued. “And a role-based culture can have conflicting agendas, because the manager might want something different than what the operator is doing, or the director thinks that the manager is doing something different than what they’re doing.” In a task-based culture, employees have equal ownership and are empowered. To learn more about role-based and task-based cultures, see the graphic above.

Sage advice

Your food safety culture must be adaptable, Casal-Wardle says. She recommends having clear expectations of your current food safety state and adapting to the changes that come either internally or externally. “Change is creating a new habit. In creating a new habit, you have to create the tools for the people to understand why you are changing it, and how that is going to help them, and why it is important.”

She says communication is a key factor in the success of the culture. “Explain the objectives, manage the objectives, be open to questions,” she declares. 

Uhls says food safety is an ongoing process. “Partner with everyone you can to find the best systems to implement any way you can,” she states. “Share what you can, and do the best you can.”

Sullivan concurs, but adds, “Don’t give up. Reach out to companies, places, or people that can help you with what you’re struggling with.”

Fear says it is critical that everyone understand the role they play in making food safety a top priority. He says Conagra Brands is committed to training and empowering people to identify potential issues and improvement opportunities, and then following through by taking the right actions. After all, Fear states, “the most discerning judges are customers and consumers.” 

Our (Engaged) People Are Our Greatest Asset