This article is based on a panel discussion held April 19 as part of a North American Millers’ Association virtual Spring Conference. Panelists included:
- Ron Burke, senior director-food safety, quality, and regulatory, Ardent Mills;
- Marie Gould, manager-Quality Systems, McDonald’s USA;
- Mark Moorman, director-Office of Food Safety, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Those who registered for the conference can view the presentation using their provided unique link.
What is a Healthy Food Safety Culture
Ron Burke: Ardent Mills defines culture as values lived even when no one is watching. Our values include:
- Trust – Working to earn trust every day and always operating with reliability and integrity.
- Serving – Serving others with understanding, respect, and care.
- Simplicity – Operating with simplicity, clarity, and transparency and removing barriers and letting people do what they do best.
- Safety – Ensuring the safety of our products and people; doing what’s best to create the safest environment now and for the future.
When it comes to Ardent Mills’ food safety culture, the values of simplicity and safety are key. Our goal is to create a landscape or environment in our business where food safety always can be successfully implemented and sustained, thus preventing loss and driving value to our stakeholders, customers, and employees.
Six pillars of healthy food safety culture. To ensure a healthy food safety culture is sustained, we have in place several pillars:
- The right leadership who will support the food safety culture.
- The right programs to guide operations. It is key that programs are designed with simplicity in mind, so employees can follow a clear, step-by-step process.
- Employee ownership and engagement in all areas of the business, not just where food safety is concerned.
- Healthy culture elsewhere. It’s difficult to have a healthy food safety culture if you don’t have a healthy worker safety culture.
- Ongoing assessment for continuous improvement.
- Reward and recognition for employees who act in accordance with Ardent Mills’ values.
On the road to developing a healthy food safety culture, it’s important to understand that there is no finish line. There are milestones to celebrate along the way, but the work is never done.
Marie Gould: When you take a bite of a sandwich, the last thing you’re thinking is, “Will this make me sick or hurt me?” There is so much trust given to the companies that grow, distribute, and prepare food.
The United States food supply and infrastructure has evolved so much over time. With increased manufacturing and distribution come new, unanticipated challenges.
So to continue to maintain a high level of trust with our customers, food safety culture is the key to success.
This is an industry where repairing relationships with customers can take years. Food safety is about emotions and the feeling of safety.
-Marie Gould, McDonald’s USA
Similarly to what Ron said about Ardent Mills, McDonald’s food safety culture is about doing the right thing when no one is looking. As a business leader or quality control professional, it’s not good enough to just have programs and written policies in place, you need to make sure your message is heard on the frontline, where the heart of a company’s food safety culture lives.
Why it matters. In the food industry, you can expect something to go wrong at some point. Without a strong food safety culture in place, people can get hurt and businesses can be damaged irreparably. The average direct cost of a food safety-related product recall is approximately $10 million, not factoring in lost business or brand damage.
It’s also important to understand the speed at which information travels today. For example, an article was shared on social media concerning a recall that impacted McDonald’s. The article was viewed by 64 million people in the first four hours. Consumers today have a keen eye on the food industry.
Once customer trust is broken, they no longer feel good about your product, you can expect their purchasing behavior to change. This is an industry where repairing relationships with customers can take years. Food safety is about emotions and the feeling of safety.
Food safety also can be viewed as a business enabler. When consumers feel good about the food they’re eating, sales often increase as a result.
Three insights. A strong commitment to food safety can be broken down into three insights: management commitment, training, and measurement.
• Management commitment – You can’t positively influence company culture without management commitment. At McDonald’s, I consistently hear from upper management and executives about food safety being the company’s top priority. We have a food safety week each year that consists of targeted communications and activities with the goal of talking about food safety and creating opportunities for learning.
It’s not just about discussing food safety but taking action. Leadership c always should be considering new initiatives and programs to further food safety.
• Training – Make sure the type of training you are providing matches the audience. For example, training given to processing personnel should be different from the training given to those involved in distribution. Tailoring your training to specific audiences will increase their effectiveness.
No matter the position or department, every employee should know their role and responsibility in ensuring food safety. If you were to ask every employee at your company to define their role in food safety, what percentage could do so?
Additionally, training is not just helping employees learn. It’s also about appealing to their hearts. Remind employees that real people and their families depend on safe food just like they do.
• Measurement – If you’re unable to properly measure your company’s food safety performance, you can’t be certain of where things stand or if your level of safety is increasing or decreasing. I believe we will see an increase in the use of metrics and data to help analyze food safety.
Some common methods of analyzing performance are interviews, surveys, assessments, as well as training reach, which is a metric indicating the number of people you have trained and their level of comprehension. I’ve also seen the metric of money spent on food safety to measure commitment of company leadership.
Food Safety Culture as a Driver of Advancement
Mark Moorman: Fundamentally, leadership does two things: It sets strategy for the business and its direction forward, and it sets the culture, whether positive or negative.
The FDA believes a new era of smarter food safety is on the horizon. It consists of technology-enabled traceability, new tools for prevention of outbreaks, and new business models (e.g., safer delivery methods).
The foundational driver for these is a strong food safety culture. For companies to embrace these advancements, there must be a strong food safety culture in place. Companies with strong food safety culture recognize the need to always do more as the food safety world and the tools of disease attribution are evolving and giving us new insights.
Currently, the Office of Food Safety is working on promoting food safety culture in three areas:
1. We want to determine how to promote food safety culture
throughout the food system. Regulation is not going to drive adoption of food safety culture – it has to be fostered organically within the organization.
2. We are looking internally at food safety culture at the Office of Food Safety to determine if we need to go about things differently. We are exploring novel approaches, such as third-party sampling in the produce industry.
3. We are identifying ways to better communicate with consumers to teach them about food safety and what they can do to better protect themselves in the home.
An area we are exploring is how FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture leverages technology to provide clearer and real-time communication to the public in the event of an outbreak.
Tucker Scharfenberg, managing editor
From Second Quarter 2021 MILLING JOURNAL
