Food Safety Culture Check

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the print edition of QA under the headline "Culture Check."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that one in six Americans are sickened annually by a foodborne illness, resulting in 3,000 deaths. It’s a figure referenced often in the industry, and one that companies like Walmart and Kellanova (formerly Kellogg Company) want to ensure is more than just a number to their employees on the frontlines of food safety — it’s the people in their communities that they serve every day.

“It’s not 3,000 dots on a graph — it’s 3,000 people that died,” said Dan Fone, former group director of end-to-end operations, food safety, Walmart, who recently took a new position as vice president of food safety, quality and sanitation at Dollar Tree Stores. “We’re getting that message across to our frontline associates to say, ‘That trust is with you.’”

Companies that communicate strong messages about food safety by implementing intentional food safety culture initiatives report fewer health violations and recalls, reports the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness. To discuss this further, Fone and Melissa Elliott, vice president of global quality and food safety, Kellanova, sat down with QA Managing Editor Jacqueline Mitchell and Alliance Program Director Vanessa Coffman, Ph.D., to share the strategies they’ve implemented and ways they’ve partnered with the Alliance to ensure that food safety culture is resilient companywide.

Jacqueline Mitchell: Thanks so much for being here today to discuss food safety culture. Can you start by sharing some strategies that your organizations use to create a strong food safety culture?

Vanessa Coffman: The Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness was founded in 2018, and we recognized that there was a big gap in the ability to have companies work together with consumer representatives and other stakeholders to work on food safety culture. We formed the alliance to really maximize the ability of constituent stories … to use all of that to make food safety culture stronger.

Dan Fone: We have well over a million associates operating across our stores and clubs in the U.S. alone. With turnover of associates in the U.S., we have to ensure that we keep messaging simple. We work around what we call the “High Five” that we base on World Health Organization and CDC issues most likely to cause foodborne illness. But we keep it very simple: keep it hot, keep it cold, wash and sanitize.

We need to ensure that we have operations engaged, because operators listen to operators. A message that’s clearly from the head office in Bentonville will not be as impactful as a message that’s delivered by your marketing manager, by your regional director or by your regional vice president, so we try to encourage that.

We have an internal system very similar to Facebook that we call Workplace. We encourage our stores and clubs to be somewhat competitive with each other and post videos of people washing their hands properly, videos of people showing pride in taking temperatures and ensuring a chill chain is maintained. We get that little bit of rivalry going on. And we don’t just focus that around World Food Safety Day; we try to make that an everyday occurrence.

Melissa Elliott: Some of the strategies that we use when it comes to investing in our capabilities around food safety culture are that No. 1, we ensure that there’s food safety training available and ensure that each employee is familiar and aware of these safety expectations through training before they ever step foot on our plant floors. A secondary aspect is truly educating our employees.

We’ve developed one-point lessons that intend to educate employees — and not just in how they follow food safety programs. That’s an expectation that everyone follows our food safety program. They’re doing their HACCP checks and the other things that are required on a daily basis. The one-point lessons are intended to provide routine education around why these activities are important and how we’re able to ensure that food safety is present on everyone’s mind throughout the facility all the way up to our larger organization on a day-to-day basis.

JM: Has your company implemented any new training strategies in recent years that have been aimed at strengthening food safety culture?

DF: Rather than the age-old approach of sitting people down in the store room to study at the computer or to be lectured for four, five, six, seven, even eight hours at a time, we broke everything down into short modules that are accessible to people through their work devices, so they can access them when they have time in the workday to do so. We tried to understand how Gen Z in particular learns, which is through short video-based actions. Impactful, quick, straight to the point, avoidance of too much technical jargon that’s not necessary, really focusing in and honing it down to the key messages to drive that confidence in learning wherever you can.

ME: Something new for us that we’re exploring — we have developed some VR training that we’re doing with some of our sanitation protocols that allow people to see more hands-on, even if they’re not within a facility when they take the training. They’re able, through virtual reality, to get a specific idea of how these sanitation protocols work.

DF: I love that idea, Melissa. The basics of food hygiene and food safety remain exactly the same. It’s about not reinventing the wheel, but making the wheel more relevant or making it resonate more.

JM: Whenever I talk to people about food safety culture, they say there has to be buy-in from the top. Leadership has to really support it for it to trickle down to the rest of the company. How does leadership at your company promote or instill these values?

DF: I was fortunate enough to do a store tour with one of our previous presidents and CEOs, Greg Foran. I was absolutely blown away by the depth of knowledge that he had on food safety. When we arrived unannounced at stores, one of the first things he talked about as we were in our fresh produce area was the food safety with handwashing and temperature control. He knew it; he wasn’t looking to me to ask the questions. He was making it real. He was making it important. He was being a face of food safety. He was asking people to explain what they’re doing. It was a great approach.

JM: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced when working to try to create a strong food safety culture?

DF: There is, inherent within retail, competition. Our messaging is competing in many ways with messaging about stock availability, about rotation, about a clean store, about the customer or member experience, about having a parking lot that’s free of trash. We need to ensure that our message is seen as relevant. It’s about targeting and understanding that you won’t have eight hours to do what you might want to do. You’re going to have to get that down to small, targeted messaging.

ME: Dan nailed it. We have competing priorities. In every facility, there are production numbers that we’re looking to hit; there are other metrics that we want to make sure that we are exceeding or meeting. When it comes to food safety, we need to make sure that our employees understand that it is not a trade-off.

VC: I love to hear Dan and Melissa be so critical. It shows that these are the companies that really care, and they’re the ones that I worry less about when it comes to food safety culture, because I know that they’re being self-evaluative and looking at their food safety culture programs and figuring out how to make those stronger and more mature. We’re really trying to build out resources for folks that don’t have as much manpower or financial resources to do some of the things that the bigger companies are able to do.

JM: Can you share more about those resources?

VC: All of the resources that we’ve put together so far can be found in the Alliance Food Safety Culture Toolkit [at stopfoodborneillness.org/toolkit/]. There’s help to evaluate your current food safety culture and build a road map for where you want to go. We recognize that food safety culture is a journey. There are also communication tools for how to push out messaging to employees. There are videos that share the why behind food safety and utilize some of our constituents’ stories — real people who’ve gotten really sick from a food safety incident. We’ve been doing a webinar series that’s free with the FDA. It’s a 10-part series, and after each food safety culture webinar, we’ve been taking the learnings and turning them into white papers that are easily digestible and understandable. We’ve also focused on low-cost, no-cost games that companies can take and tweak to their own needs.

JM: What steps can a company take to assess their food safety culture and see where they’re at?

ME: We have questions in our engagement survey that goes out to all employees that are intended to measure food safety culture, but we realize that is not the whole story. I think the most effective way is to measure your food safety culture through interviews with employees on the floor and direct observation. We have to see how it’s working in practice to understand where we’re at in our journey versus trying to just measure it with a document.

VC: There’s nothing worse than putting yourself out there and giving feedback and then it going into the ether. Break down those silos and have a group of champions who are going to take the messaging and the changes that you’re making and really push those forward throughout the company, not just in the food safety department.

JM: Once you do an assessment, what steps can companies take to then create and implement a plan?

DF: I’d suggest, and it’s a little spin and trickery, starting with something that you know you could be successful in, because there’s nothing that breeds success like success. If you can say, “Hey, look, we managed to get handwashing increased from 60% of associates to 90% of associates,” people see, “Oh, that worked.” That means that you will get buy-in from the right parts of the organization. Some of the more difficult pieces to shift will then fall in line. Break it down into bite-sized pieces, focus on where gaps are, focus on easy wins to start off with, communicate what you’re doing, and absolutely communicate success stories. Engage as many people as possible. Use all the players that you can, because having everything delivered from the food safety team is not really engendering a holistic approach.

JM: What is your recommendation for a food company who wants to convey the importance of food safety to their team members — everyone from the C-suite to the factory line? How do you boil down that message?

DF: It’s making it real, making it important, making people realize that it could affect them, their families, their friends, their neighbors, their community. Supermarkets are often, as indeed are food factories, the hub of the community. They’re where people shop; they’re where people congregate sometimes; they’re where people work. Instilling that sense of community is really important — making people realize that skipping the measure, not washing their hands, coming into work when they’re not feeling very well, may impact someone that they know catastrophically.

Something I try to get across to our senior leadership team, because I think it really brings it home, is I ask them, “Is the first thing you do when you walk into a supermarket to ask the manager what’s safe today?” And they look at me strangely. They say, “Well, no.” And I say, “Exactly.” It’s absolutely an inherent belief that when you walk into a supermarket, when you pick up a Kellogg’s product, it’s safe.

ME: Excellently put. It simply comes down to, we’re making food in these facilities, not just for consumers at large, but also for our families and for the people who are also working in these facilities. We’re all consumers as well.