I fondly remember my elementary biology classes when my teachers discussed the concept of food chains. The mouse eats the grain, the snake eats the mouse, and the hawk eats the snake. Or the little fish eats the algae, the big fish eats the little fish, the raccoon eats the big fish, the alligator eats the raccoon, and people eat the alligator! In class, I would struggle to put as many steps into the chain as possible and draw pictures of each plant and animal in the chain. Of course, I’d always begin with the process of photosynthesis and end with returning to the earth, resulting in quite an art project.
Apply that same diagramming process to just one of the foods in your kitchen cupboard. Try to encompass all the parties involved in today’s food industry and you can create a spider web like no other; a unique snowflake of a picture that should be as awe-inspiring as the real thing.
A NEW ERA. The workings of the food industry never cease to amaze me. While an individual facility might not see much change for a few years, the industry as a whole is dynamic and difficult to predict. Globalization might seem like an overused catch phrase to some people, but from where I’m sitting it’s a genuine phenomenon. New clients continually emerge to fill surprising niche markets. U.S. companies are expanding to more countries and many international companies are trying to export their products.
A few years ago, we could assume a few things at AIB. If a person called and asked about food safety training, they were often starting at zero. Callers wanted to hear about everything we had to offer and would request a follow-up mailing. Today many callers are well versed in numerous food safety topics, but they perceive a personal or company-wide training gap. They know their current place in the big picture and they know where they want to be in the future. They use the Internet and research topics on their own. The food industry has converged with the information age.
This new, savvy client made us realize it was time to take a hard look at how things work. In the food chain, what is the underlying, unifying origin? The sun. Now think about the food industry web. What is the common unifier here? Workers. Millions of them. The food industry is a physical, labor-filled organism. Who controls whether or not a company is operating in “food safe mode” all the time, some of the time or never? Workers.
For the most part management gets food safety. You’ve gotten it for years. The trouble is communicating with the people on the line, the maintenance staff or third-shift sanitarians. Like it or not, the workers of our industry are like the sun in the food chain. Even at the highest level of automation, without the hands we employ, the web we are all moving in would not exist.
What do workers really need to know? Don’t sell them short. They think. If they didn’t think, they wouldn’t ask why. How often do supervisors have to explain “why?” When explaining that something has to be done or done differently because of HACCP or food security, where do you begin? What does HACCP stand for? And why should it matter? It’s easy to just give up and say “because I said so!” Leaving your worker feeling like he’s a child being shooed away. Trained workers are assets supporting your business goals.
Let’s say that again – trained workers are assets. The converse of this would be – untrained workers are liabilities.
ONLINE TRAINING. AIB has been training workers for years. In-plant lectures, videos, and correspondence courses have all been effective and will continue to be. But it was clearly time to embrace all the things mentioned here – complexity, a large work force, globalization, the information age – and offer something new. Food Safety Essentials online was the end result.
Quality managers have been the quickest to embrace the program. Perhaps this is because it is quality managers who most often have to explain “why.”
I had the opportunity to visit with one of our most active subscribers recently. Jeffrey Louder is the QA Manager at a packaging manufacturer. He is also the Food Safety Essentials program administrator and has worked with his HR Department to make five of the 15 courses required for all employees. At his facility all employees means everyone including managers, customer service representatives, the shipping department, etc. Course completion is tied to performance evaluations, which are consecutively tied to pay. His company does not have a need to learn about temperature control so no one takes that particular course. And only maintenance staff takes the maintenance courses. Mr. Louder finds the courses to be straightforward and the administrative tools easy to use. Other comments from subscribers include:
• “It’s rewarding to us to sit back and listen to our employees talk about the concepts they’ve learned.” – Cherrie Brown, QA Supervisor
• “This program explains some of the things we, as managers, ask our employees to do. In the past, employees have not been convinced all our requests are justified…they now know why they have been asked to do these things. In short, it has made this part of my job a little easier.” – Richard McCoy, Production Supervisor
• “I’m seeing people apply what they’ve learned and pointing out things...it’s very exciting!” – Jan Lillemo, QA Manager
If you have a training success story (whether you are using AIB programs or not), we’d like to hear about it. We would also like to challenge you to help us add to and refine this idea of a universal curriculum. Do you need training on topics that are currently unavailable? Is your business special and generalized training simply hasn’t worked for you? Are there different topics you need? Tell us. We might ask “why” at some point in the conversation, but you should be used to that. AIB
The author is Administrator, Continuing Education, AIB.