Matthew Wilson Ph.D.

Once seen primarily as compliance enforcers, QA teams are now expected to be strategic business partners, shaping food safety culture, driving skills development, and leveraging risk and data analytics to enable continuous improvement.

To date, food safety training has emphasized compliance rather than prioritizing the end consumer. This approach has served its purpose, but it is time to (figuratively) bring the consumer into the training room and redesign food safety education and training with a sharper focus and impact.  

Proposed certification scheme updates, such as SQF Edition 10 and ISO 9001:2026, are shifting the focus from compliance to proactive, integrated food safety management. For quality assurance teams, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity: ensuring safe, compliant operations while influencing broader operational performance and workforce capability.

By prioritizing evaluation, a food business can ensure that training programs deliver real value to the employee and business while optimizing resources, driving growth, and promoting continuous improvement.

By examining global standards such as HACCP, GFSI, and SQF, this article explores the gaps in current competency assessments and the risks posed by these gaps. It also provides actionable strategies to empower frontline leaders and quality assurance teams to improve where necessary.

Quality assurance professionals and frontline leaders must ensure that food handlers learn and apply food safety principles on the job. Effective food safety training should be action-oriented, engaging, and designed to build competence.

Food businesses must shift from compliance to competence, embedding transition plans as a core requirement of a learning and development strategy.

A risk assessment is a systematic process used to identify, analyze, and address potential hazards that could compromise safety. It considers how likely a hazard is to occur and the severity of its consequences, leading to control measures that reduce risks to a safe level. These assessments should be dynamic, practical, action-oriented, and designed to foster true competence.

As reliance on digital tools increases, it is essential to recognize human skills in maintaining high food safety standards.

Industry conferences play a critical role in addressing skills gaps by providing access to leading research, regulatory updates, and best practices. They serve as a platform where professionals can engage in meaningful discussions about the challenges they face, exchange ideas, and collaborate on solutions.