Best Practices for Making Long-Term Changes in Behavior
Why do we still have such unacceptably high levels of foodborne illness despite the millions of dollars spent to comply with ever-increasing regulations by all segments of the food industry and the millions of dollars spent on university research? Combine these costs with the tax dollars spent to staff and enforce food safety regulations from the local departments of health all the way to the federal government. Could it be that we have reached the point of diminishing returns using these traditional approaches to increase the safety of our food supply?
Why is reducing consumer risk important to you and your company? Let’s start by estimating the annual cost of the impact of foodborne illness each year. A foodborne disease outbreak occurs when two or more people become ill from eating a common food.[1] Hoffman et al.[2] estimated that the annual negative impact of foodborne illness on the U.S. economy ranged from as little as $4.4 billion to as much as $33 billion. In addition to these annual costs, Batz et al.[3] calculated the loss of quality of life to be more than 60,000 quality-adjusted years of life each year in the U.S. alone. Moreover, the monetary cost of a foodborne illness to a family is incalculable. Scharff et al.[4] stated that in addition to not being able to include the costs of human suffering, most of these cost estimates do not include:
• The total costs of the consumers’ medical treatment
• The loss of personal wages
• The cost to the food company to recall the contaminated food products
• Intangibles with real dollar costs like the loss of consumers’ confidence in your company’s brand
• The time you would spend preparing expert testimony in defending against and paying judgments in lawsuits
• The additional costs of the response of regulatory and health agencies to foodborne illness outbreaks