Food safety culture works at the intersection of food science, organizational culture, and social cognitive science.[1] We need to understand the interactions between traditional food sciences, including food safety, and the sociocultural sciences to determine what food safety culture is and how it can be measured and improved. Although everybody is talking about it, food safety culture is a relatively new concept for the food industry, and it is useful to look back at food safety assurance developments in recent history to understand our route into food safety culture and why it is so important today. In this article, we will consider how thinking in food safety culture has developed and how blending the food and sociocultural sciences together helps us improve food safety performance.
The Path to Food Safety Culture
Starting with food safety management systems and, in particular, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), most people will know very well the history of HACCP through the U.S.-manned space program and the work of the Pillsbury Company.[2] Integrating failure mode effects analysis (FMEA), which has been used since World War I, this pioneering work in the 1960s and ‘70s laid the foundations for food safety systems and practices that still form the mainstay of food safety management today. Thirty years ago, a new graduate entering food manufacturing would have been lucky to get involved in early HACCP if they worked for one of the early adopting companies. Remember, this was before publication of the HACCP principles by Codex and the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods,[3,4] and it was through these texts and some early regulatory standards that HACCP really started to take off in the 1990s. Early on, HACCP was reported by the World Health Organization (WHO)[5] as an effective and economical way to prevent foodborne disease; this was a widely shared view that led some governments to believe that its implementation was a remedy for all food safety issues.[6] In some markets, HACCP was microbiology and compliance driven, while others recognized its role in continuous improvement and doing the right thing.
Through the 1990s, there was much focus on HACCP training and the development of formal HACCP plans, with the later understanding of the importance of also formalizing the supporting prerequisite programs to control the general operational hygiene conditions. However, foodborne illness outbreaks continued to occur, and auditors of HACCP systems started to see problems with both the design of HACCP plans and their implementation.
HACCP was, and is, a logical approach to food safety control. By identifying the hazards that could occur and potentially make consumers ill, appropriate control measures could be designed and implemented. While great in theory, this was not working well in practice; steps needed to be taken to ensure that systems were working effectively.[7] What was missing was the social science side and an understanding of the crucial role of people from a scientific perspective.
Some aspects of people systems, such as knowledge and training, have long been associated with food safety management systems (FSMSs) and HACCP in particular;[3,6,8–10] these are also items that have been identified as barriers to successful food safety management.11 Also identified as important in early HACCP guidance was management commitment,3,4,8 which was thought to come from an understanding of the potential impacts of unsafe food on the consumer and the business: In other words, senior managers seeing food safety management as the right thing to do. HACCP awareness training was often suggested for senior managers and the workforce in general to help share this understanding and commitment throughout food companies, and the demonstration of commitment by managers was seen as important for workforce commitment and behavior. These early clues to the impact of people and culture on effective FSMSs have evolved into the considerations of organizational and food safety culture today.
Even though the U.S. has started implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA; signed into law in January 2011) and numerous other countries have updated their food safety systems, we continue to have increasing numbers of major foodborne illness outbreaks. According to the WHO, there are about 420,000 deaths a year from foodborne disease and about one-quarter of those deaths (~125,000) are children under 5 years old.[12]