Success factors in food safety culture
Bertrand Emond, Head of Membership and Training
In this video Bertrand Emond, head of membership and training, talks about the success factors in food safety culture. The key success factors include:
- Robust training needs analysis
- Clear competency and capability frameworks
- Effective root cause analysis
- Strong leadership
- Fit for purpose equipment, factories and clothing
Find out more about food culture excellence.
About Bertrand Emond
Bertrand has a wealth of knowledge, experience and connectivity from working here at Campden BRI since 1988. Bertrand has a Master's in Food Science & Technology (Dijon, France) and a Master's of Business Administration (Bath, UK).
Bertrand is passionate about supporting the industry in the areas of skills, knowledge, training, learning and development, competency and achieving culture excellence through behaviour change. He won the 2020 BRCGS CEO Europe Award recognising his commitment and contribution to food safety and the 2014 Heinz Award for Excellence for Leadership in Collaborative CPD for the Industry (in particular for his role in supporting competency and CPD, promoting the food industry as a career of choice, and providing collaboration between all stakeholders).
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Transcript
To achieve a strong food safety culture and drive and sustain positive food safety behaviours, you need to consider a number of key success factors. Factors include, in no particular order, robust training needs analysis in cycle, clear competency and capability framework and effective root cause analysis when an employee is not behaved in the right way. It involves strong leadership senior leaders and managers need to show their clear and consistent commitment to making safe food, which includes dedicating and investing resources time and effort to train and educate staff and also establishing and effective systems of rewards and key performance indicators.
You need to ensure that all people involved in food production the staff, the agency, staff and contractors realize that they play part in food safety and that they are accountable and that they empowered to take action to prevent a food safety failure. Employees need to have fit for purpose fit for use clothing and equipment and work in fit for purpose hygienically designed premises and buildings. They need to be aware of all relevant hazards and risks that might have a food safety impact on their business and communicate this to their staff in an effective manner with regular updates. To keep food safety top of mind and engage employees fully, senior leaders as well as food safety and technical people, need to leverage the functional expertise of peers in other functions including health and safety to pick up on tips and techniques as they have a lot of experience in behaviour based approaches to drive compliance, marketing to help to segment the workforce and develop targeted food safety messaging taking, into account deep culture different generation job types, HR human resources to help with developing and managing the continuing professional development of each employee the competency framework and various training and learning activities required there you need to organize. HR usually has access to dedicated software packages and tools as opposed to you battling your way through an Excel spreadsheet, as in when you can squeeze it into your busy schedule Also remember that HR support is valuable when designing effective reward systems to reinforce desired food safety behaviours.
Remember, food safety and quality is a shared responsibility, you cannot do it on your own you. Will need to involve your whole organization to work with you closely with your colleagues in different parts of the organization. This is not one exercise; this is a continuous improvement journey. It's a very exciting journey that pays great dividend if you do it right.
