Tag Archives: culture

Industry speaks: Restaurant letter grades are misleading

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Rich Stytzer, state board member and immediate past president of the Westchester/Rockland Chapter of the New York Restaurant Association and vice president of Antun’s of Westchester Catering in Elmsford made the following points in Westfair Online. My comments follow.

“The New York State Restaurant Association (NYSRA) and its members believe food safety is of the utmost importance and take steps every day to educate members and workers about proper food handling techniques. NYSRA holds ServSafe training classes throughout the state to educate members, offers products and materials to train employees and has even lobbied in favor of mandatory foodhandler certifications to better protect its members, the industry and the customers.”

ServSafe is nice but does it really work? Is it as effective as those signs that say, ‘Employees Must Wash Hands?’ And if the industry wanted mandatory foodhandler certifications, it would already exist – for everyone, not just a manager.

“NYSRA’s concerns about this letter-grading legislation lie with the assumption that letter grades are associated with improved compliance by restaurants and will lead to a decline in foodborne illness.”

Those assumptions are full of holes. That’s why I argue restaurant inspection disclosure is really about improving the microbial food safety culture and awareness among patrons and staff. Citizens also have a right to information collected through the tax dollars.

“NYSRA believes educating operators, rather than fining or publicly humiliating them, is a better course of action.”

How, where and when will this ‘better education’ happen?

“The idea of using letter grades for restaurant inspections is not widely accepted as a means to improve cleanliness or as an inspection method at all. In 1993, the Food and Drug Administration removed scoring from the model food code citing problems with the system.”

No one said letter grades is an inspection method, and if they did, they were wrong. Grades are a tool to promote food safety issues and awareness.

“As recently as 2008, the FDA was asking for research to evaluate and assess scoring methodologies. The national trend among the majority of public health professionals generally has been to avoid the use of scores or grades, which are considered to be misleading and inaccurate.”

We’ve been doing the research. Got a reference for that statement about the majority of public health types, or are you just speaking on their behalf?

“In a 2004 study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was concluded after studying more than 167,000 restaurant inspection reports, that there was no difference in average letter grades given to restaurants experiencing outbreaks compared to those that were not.”

Like any study, there were limitations. Restaurant inspection disclosure is about enhancing the food safety conversation throughout the public and with food service staff. Our own research (in press) has found embarrassment to be a powerful motivator among restaurant managers.

For those still wondering, here’s a review paper discussing the pros and cons of disclosure systems.

Filion, K. and Powell, D.A. 2009. The use of restaurant inspection disclosure systems as a means of communicating food safety information. Journal of Foodservice 20: 287-297.

Abstract??The World Health Organization estimates that up to 30% of individuals in developed countries become ill from food or water each year. Up to 70% of these illnesses are estimated to be linked to food prepared at foodservice establishments. Consumer confidence in the safety of food prepared in restaurants is fragile, varying significantly from year to year, with many consumers attributing foodborne illness to foodservice. One of the key drivers of restaurant choice is consumer perception of the hygiene of a restaurant. Restaurant hygiene information is something consumers desire, and when available, may use to make dining decisions.
 

Has ‘food safety culture’ jumped the shark?

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The first thing Bob Dudley, the new chief executive of embattled oil giant BP, vowed to do was "change the culture" of how the company tackles safety issues after the Gulf of Mexico disaster and promised to "make sure this does not happen again."

Same thing after Bhopal and the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Me and Chapman and Frank Yiannas and Chris Griffith have been pushing the concept of food safety culture for years as an enhancement to inspection, regulation and training.

Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities. It’s when one food service or farm or retail employee says to another, dude, wash your hands, without being told by the boss or the inspector.

But now that safety culture is being touted by BP, the concept may have jumped the shark.

Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. The phrase was originally used to denote the point in a television program’s history where the plot spins off into absurd story lines or unlikely characterizations. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline, usually through the employment of different actors, writers or producers.

The phrase jump the shark refers to the climactic scene in "Hollywood," a three-part episode opening the fifth season of the American TV series Happy Days in September 1977. In this story, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where Fonzie (Henry Winkler), wearing swim trunks and his leather jacket, jumps over a confined shark on water skis, answering a challenge to demonstrate his bravery. The series continued for nearly seven years after that, with a number of changes in cast and situations.
 

Government’s still not that into you; target food safety efforts using pocketbook power

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There’s a wonderful moment of clarity in the 2004 biopic, Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, depicting the famed golfer’s first trip to the British Open at St. Andrews in 1921, where he withdrew in frustration. His caddy, Angus, says,

“Do you know the definition of insanity Bobby? It’s when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.”

Bobby Jones was trying to hit a ball out of a sand trap; lots of well-meaning people are trying to improve food safety in the U.S. by focusing on the federal government, but the ball keeps rolling back into that pot-bunker.

Latest to the plate is Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, who wrote in the New York Times Sunday,

“if the Senate fails to pass the food safety legislation now awaiting a vote, tens of thousands of American children will become needlessly and sometimes fatally ill.”

Whether the Senate acts or not will have little effect on kids barfing from dangerous food.

Schlosser roles out the standard fairtytales about Upton Sinclair and the role his book, The Jungle, had on inspiring The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, but food safety was improving in previous decades, driven largely by the same two factors driving global food safety improvements today – technology and trade.

Something the Chinese are now discovering.

Most food purchases are based on faith. That’s why an extensive series of rules, regulations and punishments emerged beginning in 12th century Mediterranean areas, long before Upton Sinclair came along. But who knows if the rules actually make a difference.

Big or small, local or global there are microbiological basics with any kind of food production system that require attention and diligence.

Yet there are so many examples of food safety failures despite government oversight – peanut paste, pot pies and 2005’s E. coli outbreak in Wales – Angus may ask, what?

I generally ignore food safety chatter from Washington. If a proposal does emerge, such as the creation of a single food inspection agency or the passage of this Senate bill, I ask, Will it actually make food safer? Will fewer people get sick?

The American-Statesman in Texas reported this morning that with the government and regulators making little food safety progress, individuals and businesses are taking on the responsibility themselves.

Whole Foods spokeswoman Kate Lowery said,

"We see the law as a minimum requirement, and we are always proactive and look at areas to raise the bar. Our approach is more of a preventative one, and we work with our suppliers and at the store level to ensure we meet and exceed what is required to stay ahead."

And Whole Foods has crappy food safety.

I admire people who can tell compelling stories. I also admire the food safety types throughout the world who work diligently to deliver food that won’t make people barf.

Government has something to do with it. However the best producers, processors, retailers and restaurants will go above and beyond government standards – and brag about it. The best provide public access to food safety test results, provide warnings to populations at risk, insist on mandatory training for anyone who touches food, and market food safety at retail, to create a food safety culture all the way back to the farm.

The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent — whether it’s live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website — to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

And the best won’t sit around lamenting the failures of government: they’ll just do it.

Bobby Jones adjusted his game to the Old Course, fell in love, and designed the Master’s in Augusta Georgia as a tribute to St. Andrews. Those lobbying government about food safety rules may also want to adjust their game: governments don’t make safe food – people do.
 

Can organizational culture sabotage food safety change?

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Terri Waller, a Master of Public Administration student at Troy University and a certified food safety manager and instructor, writes in this guest blog that,

My grandfather, James Davis, always addressed an issue immediately. All bad habits in our house were addressed and put to rest. Food safety managers should do the same — immediately correcting a bad habit will have a positive affect on establishments, scores, and the community in which they serve.

Being a food safety professional, I see almost daily, educated food service managers fail to implement proper food safety concepts. This failure is associated with the culture of the establishment. If the culture of an establishment has always been to perform a task incorrectly or not at all, it is embedded into the DNA of that organization.

Food safety professionals must get in the habit of protecting the community from foodborne illness. I agree with Edgar Schein, social psychologist, that managers must embed correct shared values and assumptions in the organization’s culture and reinforce them in new and current members if they are to create and sustain strong cultures in their organizations (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 366).

“Organizations are not simple systems like machines or adaptive organisms; they are human systems manifesting complex patterns of cultural activity (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 361).”

Organizations are seen as extended families or clans held together by shared values and beliefs. These values and beliefs are established over time as organizations struggle with the usual problems of internal integration and external adaptation. Sometimes they are introduced into the culture by organizational founders or dynamic leaders. At other times they enter the culture unconsciously as members learn how to cope successfully with problems. Over time, these values and beliefs become embodied in myths and rituals that allow the shared culture to be internalized and transmitted from one generation to the next. Once these values and beliefs are firmly established in the dominant culture, they guide the daily decisions of organizational members and provide the glue that holds the organization together. (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 361)

“The strength of a culture is best defined in terms of the homogeneity and stability of group membership and the length and intensity of shared experience (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 365).”

As a manager if you see something wrong correct it. Correcting bad habits notifies present employees of what was wrong and how it should be made right. This way everyone moves forward on the right foot. When things are implemented right in an organization it is easy for new members to come on board knowing what to do and the right way to do it.

Resource:
Tompkins, J. (2005). Organization Theory and Public Management. Boston, MA,
Wadsworth.
 

Sol Erdozain: Food is a culture thing

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Sol Erdozain writes:

Canyons Burger Co. is apparently a hamburger chain with a “culture centered on an active lifestyle,” advocating outdoor activities such as hiking and mountain biking.

They say it’s a company culture thing.

Moe’s Southwest Grill restaurants inspire clients to “be different” and encourage creativity and openness among employees.

That’s their culture thing.

Elevation Burger is all about organic ingredients and “doing good.”

It’s great that all these food chains are trying to bring something more to the table than just food; as long as it’s not foodborne pathogens and bacteria.

Maple Leaf Foods from Canada came out with a food safety pledge this year and advertised it through all sorts of outlets to try and clean up their image after a listeria outbreak in 2008. They vow that their company culture is all about food safety now. Maple Leaf said they had a culture of food safety before the 2008 outbreak, but that now they really have one.

Hopefully it won’t take an outbreak for these other food chains to incorporate food safety into their cultures.

Walmart and Sam’s Club to require enhanced beef safety measures

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An ermerging trend in several mainstream media stories of the past year is that some of the biggest food suppliers – Costco, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Burger King – have the best food safety requirements. Quality is a different issue and largely based on personal preference and lifestyle choices. Cool. But there are some microbiological basics that food safety types have to pay attention too.

Frank ‘food safety culture’ Yiannas, vp for food safety at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. said today the company will implement additional beef safety measures designed to further protect customers against foodborne illnesses.

The new process controls standards and goals are additions to a food safety program that already requires ground beef suppliers to test for E.coli O157:H7 and achieve prevention-based certification against one of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) internationally recognized standards.

Yiannas said,

“In light of recent beef recalls, we determined it was prudent to require an additional layer of protection for our customers.”

The new program requires Walmart and Sam’s Club beef suppliers to implement controls that would significantly reduce potential contamination levels and validate that the measures they’ve implemented are effective through specialized testing.

Suppliers who do not operate slaughter houses must be in compliance with the new standard by June 2011. For beef slaughterhouse suppliers, there is a two-step approach with the first step to be completed by June 2011 and the second by June 2012.

Walmart and Sam’s Club will work closely with beef suppliers to ensure that the new requirement is implemented without additional cost to customers.
 

Missouri, listeria and a culture of food safety

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My friend Jorge Hernandez and I both spoke at the Missouri Milk, Food and Environmental Health Association annual meeting in Columbia, Missouri on April 2, 2010.

We never plan these things because we’re both busy – Jorge in his crisp, tailored suit, talking about all the meals U.S. Foodservice serves in a day, me looking ever more rumpled and frumpy as I evolve into the professor’s outfit of patches on the elbows of the corduroy suit jacket in my future. But our talks were surprisingly complimentary. Jorge (right, not exactly as shown) with his self-deprecating Mexican jokes, me just looking weird.

Jorge took a similar message to the Conference for Food Protection meeting in Rhode Island this week, calling for the creation of integrated food safety cultures within the farm-to-fork food safety system.

“The best way to ensure the right food safety and HACCP behaviors from employees, suppliers, and customers is to make sure there are clear benefits and rewards for excellence,” said Hernandez, U.S. Foodservice’s senior vice president, food safety and quality assurance. “A culture of continuous improvement must be developed at all levels of the food chain.”

Jorge gets it, which is good considering the number of safe meals US Foodservice provides on a daily basis. He also likes to say, trust, but verify, which is appropriately apt when dealing with food safety.

I’m not sure John Coyne, vice-president of legal and corporate affairs for Unilever Canada gets it. He told a recent symposium,

"We are not just in the protection business, we are in the anticipation business. … (The) 2008 listeria event shook our entire industry; going forward, if we fail to anticipate food safety risks, it will be at our peril” and he encouraged companies to adopt a "culture of courage" when it comes to food safety.

The 22 people who died in the Canadian listeria outbreak were not an event: they were a preventable tragedy. Have the courage to call it accurately, Coyne. When I was in Missouri earlier this month I asked the audience of sanitarians, didn’t the nursing homes where all these Canadians died have dieticians and how brilliant was it to be giving immuno-compromised elderly folks cold-cuts that were a known listeria risk? A woman interjected and stated,

“I’m a dietician.”

“OK”

“We got one hour of food safety training.”

“Is that god or bad?”

“It’s awful.”

What is a food safety culture?

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Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities.

There’s lots of other definitions, but Amy and I spent some time figuring this one out so that’s what we’re going with. (That’s Amy, right, talking about language, culture, memory and Pied-Noirs, the former French inhabitants of Algeria, at her undergraduate alma mater, Truman University in Kirksville, Missouri, where she was feted Monday night.)

Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart wrote in his aptly named 2009 book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System, that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture, and that culture is patterned ways of thought and behaviors that characterize a social group which can be learned through socialization processes and persist through time.

Yiannas also writes:

• The goal of the food safety professional should be to create a food safety
culture – not a food safety program.

• An organization’s culture will influence how individuals within the group
think about food safety, their attitudes toward food safety, their willingness
to openly discuss concerns and share differing opinions, and, in general, the
emphasis that they place on food safety.

• When it comes to creating, strengthening, or sustaining a food safety culture
within an organization, there is one group of individuals who really own it –
they’re the leaders.

• Having a strong food safety culture is a choice. The leaders of an organization
should proactively choose to have a strong food safety culture because
it’s the right thing to do, as opposed to reacting to a significant issue or
outbreak.

• Creating or strengthening a food safety culture will require the intentional
commitment and hard work by leaders at all levels of the organization,
starting at the top.

• Although no two great food safety cultures will be identical, they are likely to
have many similar attributes.

• Identifying food safety best practices can be useful, but one major drawback
to creating such a list is that it doesn’t really demonstrate how these activities
are linked together or interrelated. It misses the big picture – the system.

• To create a food safety culture, you need to have a systems-based approach to
food safety.

Chris Griffith, formerly of the University of Wales in Cardiff, and colleagues, have just published three papers in the British Food Journal with their take on food safety culture.

Griffith proposes that food safety culture is,

The aggregation of the prevailing, relatively constant, learned, shared attitudes, values and beliefs contributing to the hygiene behaviours used within a particular food handling environment.

Griffith also writes there are many attributes from organizational safety culture that can be applied to food safety culture, including:

• it describes beliefs shared by members in an organization;

• it requires a contribution from people at all levels;

• it has an impact on work performance/behaviour, practices or behavioural norms;

• it concludes a set or subset of values and attributes that are relatively stable and which may be resistant to change;

• there are likely to be a range of factors contributing to culture and that business
with a strong culture can achieve this in a range of ways;

• culture is communicated to and learned by new staff;

• an organization can be composed of several subcultures; and,

• there maybe different food safety cultures at different levels within an
organization, especially in larger ones.

The second paper concludes that food safety does not happen by accident and to produce safe food consistently, especially on a large scale, requires management. Management includes the systems that are used and the organizational food safety culture of compliance with those systems. Food poisoning will never be totally prevented however to a considerable extent a business does get the food poisoning it deserves.

I’m thinking Peanut Corporation of America, and about 100 other examples.

Finally, Griffith et al. develop six potential groupings to assess food safety culture within an organization including ; food safety management systems and style, food safety leadership, food safety communication, food safety commitment, food safety environment and risk perception.

These are valuable contributions to the emerging concept of food safety culture. Chapman and I look at how best to influence and nurture that culture – how to keep the mundane aspects of food safety relevant for all those communities in the farm-to-fork food safety system including farms, food processing facilities, domestic and international distribution channels, retail outlets, restaurants, and domestic kitchens.

Creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems, including compelling, rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated, multi-linguistic and culturally-sensitive messages. That’s why we create food safety infosheets (in several languages), blog posts (even the silly ones) and get out in the field to figure out what works best. Talking with people helps.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent — whether it’s live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website — to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

Food safety audits never enough

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“Know your suppliers. An audit does not make up for lack of knowledge of a supplier.”

So said Bob Whitaker, chief science officer for the Newark, Del.-based Produce Marketing Association, at the Winning at Retail conference last week.

Or as Mansour Samadpour of Seattle says,??

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education.”

Which is why every time some group like organic growers proclaims to be validated by third-party audits as a sign of superior product, I sigh. Have they not heard of the third-party audits done at Peanut Corporation of America which found the plant produced superior peanut paste – so superior that some 700 people got sick, nine died and over 4,000 products had to be recalled because of Salmonella flourished in the crappy production plant?

Guess that didn’t come up in a recent survey announced by press release and uncritically repeated by others.

A study being conducted by Michigan State University (MSU) on behalf of DNV finds that U.S. consumers are highly aware of food safety issues and they have high recognition of third party certification as an effective signal of food safety assurance. The consumers strongly prefer to see products labeled as safety certified. … US consumers say they want to see evidence on product labels that the food they are buying has passed some kind of independent safety certification process. Moreover, slightly more than one third of consumers indicate a willingness to pay a premium, upwards of 30 percent more.

Food safety surveys along with hypothetical willingness-to-pay studies are crap: people overestimate their own food safety behaviors and vote at the supermarket checkout counter with their wallets.

The vast number of facilities and suppliers means audits are required, but people have been replaced by paper. Audits, inspections, training and systems are no substitute for developing a strong food safety culture, farm-to-fork, and marketing food safety directly to consumers rather than the local/natural/organic hucksterism is a way to further reinforce the food safety culture.

Whitaker also challenged the conventional wisdom that a high audit score — especially on an announced audit — is indicative of an all-is-well food safety program.

He said it’s obvious when a company cleans up in preparation for an audit.

“Unfortunately, I think in this industry we’ve gotten pretty good at dressing up and taking audits.”