Excellent food safety is a lifestyle choice. It’s a cultural thing… it’s a way of life. Having a good quality program in your plant or at your company is similar to a production facility having a good employee safety culture. A safety culture helps to ensure that everyone gets to go home to their family at the end of the day. I look at food safety at the plant or corporate QA level in the same way. As everyone does their jobs every day, their attitude and behaviors toward quality, contribute to the ‘culture of quality’ and keeping our consumers safe.
Food quality has many facets, but the most important aspect is food safety. Quality programs protect the people we love and there are very few issues as emotional as those around food safety and security. I recently read about a little girl dying from E. coli O157 food poisoning. Her friend was very sick because he ate the other half of her turkey sandwich. For more information, click here: E. coli kills Oregon girl.
It’s very difficult to say where the source of the contamination occurred, but rest assured each and every ingredient in the sandwich will be scrutinized. As a parent, our hearts go out to the families. As a Quality professional, I want to ensure everyone in my sphere of influence is doing everything possible to keep this from happening to our consumers. We are often encouraged not to let emotions affect our work, however when it comes to food safety, my emotional response clearly motivates me to do my best to prevent contamination whenever possible.
When it comes down to it, food companies are selling trust. Consumers don’t want to think about food as a source of risk. Most of us ‘trust’ our food supply and don’t think about getting sick when we eat something.
“All I ask of food is that it doesn’t harm me.” Michael Palin (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) link to quote Michael Palin is a comedian, and he makes a serious point. Our food supply should not cause harm. Unfortunately, things happen and quality professionals must be extremely vigilant when it comes to food safety in their production facilities.
Identifying and eliminating potential sources of contamination is a difficult task. Having personally spent countless hours performing inspections and developing food safety programs, I believe it is possible to prevent the vast majority of quality incidents before they turn in to major problems.
Several years ago, I was the Quality Manager at a plant making a ready-to-eat product. One day I had a great discussion about food safety with the line operators. I asked them how many jars of our product do we think our consumers buy at a time. Everyone said they most likely buy one jar at a time. I said to them, “Then as consumers, our ‘experience’ with most food products is one jar at a time.”
I sensed that they were getting my drift when they rolled their eyes. I understood why my audience was a little skeptical because their particular production line could make over 300,000 jars of product every day. I’m sure they were thinking, ‘How could they possibly watch every jar on the line?’ I said to them, “We may produce thousands of jars a day here, but it is our job to make sure that every single jar is right. When it comes down to it, we sell one jar at a time.”
This insight hit home. Instead of being focused on how many jars we could make every day, the operators realized they needed to see the world from the consumer’s perspective; one jar at a time. If there was something happening on the line or in the production process that potentially compromised the quality of the product, it had to be addressed immediately. As we now say: “if you see something, say something.
“Food safety involves everybody in the food chain.” – Mike Johanns, US Senator link to quote
How do we help the workers in the plant understand they are the most important link in the supply chain with regards to food safety?
I knew there was a tendency to let ‘management’ be responsible for quality at that facility. I also knew the best defense was on the front lines of the battle. To change this mindset, we conducted a plant-wide education effort and made it clear that everyone was responsible for quality and food safety. Here are some of the principles we enacted to change the culture and truly improve food safety:
- Everyone working on the line was given the authority to stop the line if they saw something that could create a situation where foreign material contaminated the product. This sounds like common sense, but in many plant cultures, stopping the line is frowned upon. We made it clear that anytime foreign material was visible on or near the equipment, the line must be stopped immediately and the material removed as quickly and cleanly as possible. No questions asked. Enabling the operators and line workers to stop the line anytime they saw the potential for contamination was very empowering and sent the right message to everyone in the plant.
- Quick inspections or mini-audits were performed on a frequent basis to ensure conditions compromising food safety were rapidly identified and addressed. We found that a daily checklist performed by a line operator was the most effective way to stay on top of the situation. Thorough audits are helpful, but if they are performed once a month, a problem can manifest and create an unsafe condition for several days or weeks before being corrected. A combination of daily inspections and thorough audits enabled us to correct any potential issues quickly.
- Enlisting the sanitation teams to help identify possible environmental sources of contamination was a key to controlling the situation. ‘Environmental’ exposure is very difficult to detect and it usually requires a different approach to identify the source of contamination. We asked the sanitation team to think about the environment from a worst-case scenario perspective. For example, what if the source of contamination was the mop buckets and contaminants were being brought into the production environment during the cleaning process? There may be assumptions about the mop buckets being clean because they hold the sanitizer, but is it possible the wheels of the mop bucket are not fully sanitized? Involving the sanitation crew and supervisors in a thorough review of the practices was a key to uncovering these ‘environmental’ risks.
Those of us working in the food industry have the daunting responsibility of preventing our consumers from having a bad experience on all levels, especially with regards to food safety. The line operators are the last ones to ‘touch’ or see the product before it is shipped out. When they are empowered and encouraged to act upon any potential source of contamination, the vast majority of the potential issues are corrected before they become problems. Instilling a ‘culture of quality’ is the best defense against a food safety problem.
Photo credit: Depositphotos Weat 44731215