Understanding and Improving your Culture of Food Safety

Food safety culture is defined by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) as ‘shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mind-set and behaviour toward food safety in, across and throughout an organization’. There are many elements that assist in creating a positive and effective culture that ensures food safety.

Food safety management systems (FSMS) have been in place, certified and at a level of maturity for decades. Despite this, the food industry still suffers from incidents such as product recalls, food poisoning outbreaks, and allergen contamination. There is one common factor in every incident – people and the way they behave. The culture of an organization is determined by this behaviour, and this impacts the ‘safety culture’, which then determines the safety of the food they produce.

The top food safety standards are introducing a requirement for measuring and implementing a culture of food safety, and at BSI we can offer support for companies on how to understand, measure and improve their vital component of their organization.

The BSI-Cultivate Understanding and Improving Your Culture of Food Safety course is built in partnership with Dr. Lone Jespersen. Content is structured on scientific principles of culture, sociology, and change management that is unique to BSI, and each of our tutors has undergone training with Lone, in order to deliver the very best learning experience to clients.

How will I benefit?

This course will enable you to implement a successful programme to measure and improve a culture of food safety throughout your organization. This will support your existing food safety management system, to improve the safety and quality of the foods produced and/or sold by your company.

Who should attend?

This course is for all staff working at food production and retail companies who wish to better understand the concept of food safety culture and strengthen this onsite. This includes Leadership, Management, Technical/Quality Assurance, HR, Production, Operations, Marketing, Procurement/Purchasing, Supply and Distribution.

Pre-requisites:

It would be helpful to read through the GFSI Working Group document on Food Safety Culture, in order to prepare for the course.

What will I learn?

After completing the course, you'll be able to:

Describe the concept of food safety culture, leadership behaviours, and maturity levels
Evaluate an organization's and leaders' current food safety behaviours
Evaluate the readiness of an organization to improve its culture of food safety
Build an action plan to improve an organization's culture of food safety
Explain how to drive lasting improvements through goal setting, nudging, and consequences
Select measures most effective for a stage of maturity and how to build these into a food safety and quality management system to sustain improvements