With FDA now actively talking about the potential of regulating food safety culture in the future, and with USDA likely to eventually follow FDA’s lead, food companies should start working to assess where they currently stand on the continuum of food safety culture. The current challenge with evaluating food safety culture is how to objectively quantify what type of culture actually exists in a food facility.

This challenge is exacerbated when the leadership of many companies carry a perception that the company has a strong food safety culture when it does not. How many times have we heard company leadership proclaim that 'food safety comes first,' then routinely take steps that run contrary to food safety. Common examples include decreasing the time allowed for cleaning and sanitation to increase available line time, increasing production volumes to the point they over-stress the existing food safety systems, or refusing to slow or stop production to properly investigate (and eliminate) findings of environmental pathogens. Of course these companies have a culture, but it's not a good culture and they refuse or are unable to see the obvious. Or, in many cases, the companies simply do not want to.

So, what is the solution?

Given the substantial cost of many recalls, this quickly becomes a multimillion dollar question. Many experts in the field say that the food safety culture in a food facility can measured by what the employees do when no one is looking. Others say that the level of food safety culture in an organization can be gauged by whether intermittent findings of a resident pathogen in the environment are allowed to persist over any measurable length of time. These are interesting perspectives, and both ring true.

Over the years, I have worked with many clients who have struggled to eliminate pathogens from their environment. Embracing and using strain typing and aggressive response strategies, which I strongly recommend, some companies were able to effectively eliminate niche organisms within a few weeks. Others, constrained by operational and financial pressures, watched their intermittent findings of the same resident strain persist for years. Both categories of companies will proclaim they care deeply about food safety, but I will let you decide for yourself which of those companies, in fact, had the stronger food safety culture. If pathogens are allowed to persist in the environment (i.e, in the drains, on the floors, and below the processing equipment), those pathogens will inevitably find their way into finished products.

So, what is food safety culture? It's doing the right thing when no one is looking, and when they are. If a food company is seeing the same strain of Listeria intermittently in the environment, and company leadership is not supporting the interventions needed to make it go away immediately, that company may need to reassess its commitment to food safety.

Culture is fleeting, but so is safe food. They go hand in hand. Once corporate leadership begins to realize that pushing the food safety systems too hard will result in an unsafe product, then — and only then — can they brag about caring deeply about food safety.

What is food safety culture?

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