1. Enhancing Food Safety Culture to Reduce Rates of Foodborne Illness
Dr. Ben Chapman
Food safety extension specialist
Dept of 4-H Youth Dev and FCS
North Carolina State University

4. Food safety culture
The aggregation of the prevailing, relatively constant, learned, shared attitudes, values and beliefs contributing to the hygiene behaviors used within a particular food handling environment
Griffith (2010)

5. Food safety culture
It is a set of shared attitudes, values and beliefs around food safety
Production/sources
Handling/storage
Preparation
You can have a good food safety culture or a bad one

6. Impact of actions Travis Cudney 2010 Champion Child Blind since age 2
Complications from a pathogenic E. coli infection 6

7. Food safety culture Maintaining a food safety culture means:
Operators and staff know the risks associated with the products or meals they produce
Know why managing the risks is important
Can effectively manage those risks
Demonstrable

8. Fat Duck norovirus, England, 2009
Run by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal
Voluntarily closed restaurant in Feb. 2009
Originally said it wasn’t food, but an airborne virus
UK Health Protection Agency reported in Sept. 2009, 529 patrons ill with norovirus in January and February 2009
source was likely contaminated shellfish, including oysters that were served raw

9. Fat Duck Delayed response to the incident
Used inappropriate environmental cleaning products Staff working when ill
up to 16 of the restaurant’s food handlers were reportedly working with norovirus symptoms before it was voluntarily closed

10. Food safety culture Yiannas (2009) Culture not program It is a choice
Leaders own the program
Talk about consequences
Provide consequences

12. Maple Leaf Foods, Canada 2008
Listeria monocytogenes-contaminated deli meats caused 57 illnesses and 23 deaths
contamination source was commercial meat slicers that had meat residue trapped deep inside the slicing mechanisms
textbook risk communication, lousy risk management
delay in warning the public

13. Maple Leaf Listeria review
Focus on food safety was insufficient among senior management at company and government
Insufficient planning for a potential outbreak;
Those involved lacked a sense of urgency at the outset of the outbreak
Weatherill (2009) specifically identified the need for cultures of food safety at food processing companies, calling for ”actions, not words”

14. Cultural factors influencing food safety performance
Griffith, Livesey & Clayton (2010)
Leadership
Food safety management systems and style
Commitment to food safety
Food safety environment
Risk perception
Communication

15. Maple Leaf – try harder
Provide a chronological accounting of the outbreak
Warning labels to packages of ready-to-eat meats for persons at high risk for listeriosis
Testing results?

17. Marketing food safety culture
Production
Distribution
Retail/
foodservice
Consumers
Customer feedback

18. We know from the literature and our studies
Time is a factor in the kitchen
Learning in the kitchen is visual
Kitchen environment is based around a team
Generic prescriptive information is lost
Storytelling/current affairs in the environment is prevalent
Recent story and rumors about local outbreaks can be a hot topic

19. Things to concentrate on
What are the barriers/roadblocks in your firm?
Provide tools/resources
Asking questions from vendors about their practices
have a system to know what the right answers are.
Share the food safety values are with all staff
And when you get good at it (or if you already are), market it

20. Know the risks
What products do you serve have been historically linked to foodborne illness outbreaks?
Know what factors led to the illnesses

21. Food safety culture
Relatively easy (or should be) to define poor food safety culture
More difficult to enact a good one
Griffith; Yiannas; Powell and Chapman
More will come

22. External and internal Demonstrate to their staff and customers that:
they are aware of current food safety issues
learn from others’ mistakes
food safety is important within the organization

23. Dr. Ben Chapman
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