Quality Assurance

Food safety culture delivers safer fresh produce

Details: By Jessica Purbrick-Herbst

Organisational culture is hard to pinpoint, however, intrinsically most of us know if an organisation, institution, or business is a good place to work. We know if 'this is the right thing to do'.

As culture is not fact based but rather a lived human experience, it can be hard to measure.
Yet research from the Global Food Safety Initiative states that food safety culture is the shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mindset and behaviour toward food safety in, across and throughout an organisation.
Culture is shared across the whole organisation and is multi-faceted. A singular action can not improve food safety culture, instead it is the integration of multiple dimensions that will see change and stronger culture that leads to safer products for consumers.
Culture maturity
Understanding food safety culture starts with culture maturity, which can be attributed or measured by five key areas within an organisation:
Communication (between employees)
Enabling conditions (company rules)
Organisational attitudes (compatible food safety values between QA team and management)
Company vision (vision compatible with food safety)
Food safety priorities (people, training, health and safety).
In measuring the food safety culture, business can better embed learned skills such as adaptability and hazard awareness into real-time safer food practices—that being the action of doing rather than the theoretical conversation.
Food safety culture survey
The Fresh Produce Safety Centre Australia and New Zealand is asking business owners, fresh produce food safety practitioners and auditors to take the food safety culture survey—a one to five metric to create a baseline assessment of food safety culture.
This baseline data will allow culture maturity to be re-measured in 12–24 months to determine if food safety culture in fresh produce is improving.
About Us
The Fresh Produce Safety Centre Australia & New Zealand (FPSC A-NZ) brokers connections and collaborations with global leaders in fresh produce to build industry capacity and capability with novel and innovative systems and processes that leads to safer fresh produce for consumers.