How to create a positive food safety culture?

Running a food business understand the fundamentals of consumer service and the experience that deliver to customers can make or break business. With negative reviews able to be spread like wildfire, overnight brand repute can go from hero to zero. Now, would you consider food safety culture part of consumer service and experience? It’s perhaps not something had instantly consider, but it’s so vital. Poor food safety culture can lead to many foods’ hygiene abuses. Cleanliness, cross adulteration and inappropriate storage can very easily result in serious illnesses for consumers. Food hygiene destructions rapidly get picked up by the media and can tarnish reputation overnight.

At follow these key areas as trust these contribute to a positive food safety culture. Based on digital food safety clients and work as environmental health auditors where we have experiential food businesses carefully following these steps, we have seen very high food hygiene ratings given by the FSA. Here are the key areas for positive food safety culture are:

Management assurance: The first step towards making a positive safety culture is management assurance. And this should be replicated in Food Safety Management System. The owner and management team of a creation should lead by instance by demonstrating what is predictable of the food safety culture.

Responsibilities: Creating food safety responsibilities within organization from the top down is the next step to making a positive food safety culture. These responsibilities should be placed within the job description so employees know what are the expectations from their role. Keeping an accessible reminder on walls where staff are working is also a good idea to keep expectations at the front of their mind. We’re all guilty of forgetting things when we’re busy!

Great communication and training: The application of food safety rules is almost completely reliant on how well they are communicated to staff. That must start from the top down but can also come from lowest up and between personnel at the similar level. Telling employees what to do isn’t sufficient. Team has to understand why it’s significant and be repeated on a regular basis of the significances of poor food safety practices. As well as the Food Safety Culture Awareness Training carried out by the employees, complete training should also be carried out on the organizations HACCP system.

Resources: Next step towards a positive food safety culture is to ensure you have sufficient knowledge and resources to develop food safety management system. This is achieved by training key personnel within the organization or, bringing in a food safety consultant to assist. Sufficient resources to implement food safety culture system are also essential, such as temperature control & monitoring equipment, defensive clothing, chemical supplies etc. These can be done digitally which will show a drive towards a positive food safety culture as switching to digital technology eliminates the problem of possibly fabricating documentation – there is a time-stamped record of precisely what check was carried out, when, where and by whom and, furthermore, managers can view and comparison data from multiple sites from a single computer. Goodbye paper, hello time back! And also, this is a first step to make business more maintainable!

Monitoring and review: The next step is how you are going to measure the success of your positive food safety culture. This isn’t just ensuring due diligence documentation is fully completed and checked or critical control points have been met, it is also about persons completing their responsibilities as well. Why not think about connecting positive food safety culture to staff objectives? An excessive way to promote food safety culture is to celebrate employees that are really doing it! This will also help in your next food safety audits!

Continuous improvement: Finally, food safety is a not ever an ended product it should always be a constantly better. HACCP document should be a living document which is regularly reviewed, verified and if something should go wrong help figure out the steps of how and stop it from happening again. Reviewing HACCP at least once a year, or if make any changes to procedures. Keep tabs on changes in guideline as this could impact.