The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been calling on food safety communicators to design new materials aimed at increasing food safety risk-reduction practices from farm-to-fork for the past couple of years. This priority was echoed at the Food Safety Inspection Service/NSF food safety education conference a couple of weeks ago: New messages and media are needed; the traditional communication tools aren’t getting the job done.

Change can often make people antsy, but I’m all about embracing it and testing out what works.

One of our attempts at exploring new methods and messages, which sometimes can be seen as offensive or generate a Michael Scott-esque feeling of awkwardness, is the design and distribution of food safety infosheets.

A few years ago, after a couple of post-hockey discussions about placing food safety information on bulletin boards above urinals, food safety infosheets were born. The idea was to take stories pulled for FSNet (now bites.ksu.edu) and give them to food handlers because hey, who doesn’t like a good story. At first they were text heavy, boring and sort of sucked. After a couple of years of refinement – fed by intense work with the target audience through multiple experiments (including washing dishes in a commercial kitchen) folks say that the infosheets have turned into a pretty useful tool. A few food service, retail and processing companies have even built their food safety training regimes around them.

Food safety infosheets are passive, postable communication tools targeted at the food service industry (food handlers and business operators).  The infosheets are used to provide food safety risk-reduction information to generate behavior change.  The infosheets are based on four emotion-generating factors:

-Storytelling: Storytelling is used to focus on the cases/outcomes of individual incidents.
-Dialogue: The infosheets are designed to generate dialogue within the food service kitchen/system.
-Surprise: The information presented is written with surprise, sometimes humorous graphic images, and data.
-Context: The infosheets put food safety into context for food handlers by providing prescriptive information.

Two papers detailing the design, refinement and evaluation of infosheets have been accepted for publication (and should be out later this year).

Since September 2006 over 150 food safety infosheets have been produced and up until now had been held in various spots including a linear, low maintenance blog (www.foodsafetyinfosheets.com). Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on updating that site and adding utility to it including a search function, automatic email alerts and RSS feeds. The new database is also sortable by pathogen, location and risk factor.