Tag Archives: Observation

Stick it in: Thermometers work but people don’t want to use them

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This paper came out in Feb. but was lost in the Covid haze.

Observation is always better than self-reported survey BS (I cooked the turkey below, in Brisbane, and it went back in the oven)

Chapman learned well. Abstract below.

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of an intervention for consumer thermometer use by using a randomized experimental design and direct observation of meal preparation.

The study was conducted in test kitchen facilities in two locations in North Carolina (one urban and one rural). Cameras recorded participants’ actions at various locations throughout the kitchen and recorded the meal preparation from beginning to end. Before preparing the meal, a randomized treatment group watched a 3-min U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) food safety video “The Importance of Cooking to a Safe Internal Temperature and How to Use a Food Thermometer.”

Participants in the control and treatment groups were observed while cooking turkey burgers and preparing a salad to determine whether a thermometer was used to check the doneness of the turkey patties. Following meal preparation, all participants responded to a post-observation interview about food handling behaviors. Treatment group participants were also asked about the intervention.

A total of 383 people participated in the study (201 in the control group and 182 in the treatment group). Participants who viewed the video were twice as likely to use a thermometer to check the doneness of the turkey patties compared with the participants who were not exposed to the video (75 versus 34%) and twice as likely to place the thermometer in the correct location (52 versus 23%). Sixty-seven percent of participants who watched the video reported that it influenced their behavior in the kitchen.

This study demonstrates the importance of timing and framing of a behavioral intervention for thermometer use and highlights considerations for the development of additional messages (e.g., proper insertion).

An observational study of thermometer use by consumers when preparing ground turkey patties

Minh Duong; Ellen Thomas Shumaker; Sheryl C Cates; Lisa Shelley; Lydia Goodson; Christopher Bernstein; Aaron Lavallee; Margaret Kirchner; Rebecca Goulter; Lee-Ann Jaykus; Benjamin Chapman

Journal of Food Protection

https://doi.org/10.4315/JFP-19-594

https://meridian.allenpress.com/jfp/article-abstract/83/7/1167/426199

Me and Chapman, we love the covert studies (for science)

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Hand hygiene is one of the most effective method for preventing cross-contamination. Food handlers have a major role in the prevention of foodborne illness during food production1 , consequently food handler hand hygiene failures are frequently reported to be implicated in foodborne illness2 . Although informative, food safety cognitions are not indicative of actual practices and may be subject to biases3 , therefore food handlers may demonstrate awareness of food safety, however may fail to translate knowledge into safe practices4 .

For this reason observational data are superior to survey data5 . However, during direct observations, researcher presence can increase subject reactivity6 , whereas covert video observation provide a more comprehensive analysis over a sustained period, where familiarity reduces reactivity bias7 . Previous video observation research have assessed food handler behaviours at retail/catering settings8-10 , however, this method has been under-utilised in food manufacturing business environments. Covert observation may allow the comparison of practices in different areas of manufacturing over the same period of time.

A comparison of hand hygiene compliance in high-care and high-risk areas in a Welsh food manufacturing business using covert observation

Cardiff Metropolitan University

Ellen Evans, Catherine Bunston and Elizabeth Redmond

https://www.metcaerdydd.ac.uk/health/zero2five/research/Documents/Hand%20hygiene%20two%20areas%20EE_04_04_2019%20Final.pdf

Surveys still suck: Observing food safety behaviours is best, but this paper just confuses things

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Every year, studies about food handlers’ food safety knowledge, attitudes, and practices are published. Some results of these papers have been rather controversial, especially those related to food safety practices.

The two most common methods for evaluating food safety practices – self-assessment and observation – are generally treated as interchangeable, but they can have different meanings. The objective of this study was, therefore, to differentiate between the observed and self-reported food safety practices of food handlers, verifying the effect of different variables in these food safety indicators through structural equation modeling, and examining the relationship between cognitive factors and these practices.

A questionnaire with 37 questions was given to 183 food handlers to evaluate their food safety knowledge, attitudes, self-reported practices, and risk perceptions. For the observed assessment method of evaluating the food handlers’ practices (observed practices), a checklist was developed, and food handlers were observed during one workday.

Two models were developed based on the results of these two assessment methods. In the first model a significant positive effect of knowledge and a negative effect of risk perception on self-reported practices were observed. Food handlers with high risk-perception about their practices reported less adequate practices. Positive food safety attitudes acted as a moderator dampening the positive effect between knowledge and self-reported practices. In the second model a significant positive effect of knowledge on observed practices. Attitudes strengthened the positive effect between knowledge and observed practices.

A direct effect of attitude on observed practices was not observed. In conclusion, self-reported practices and observed practices are different and should be used and discussed properly.

The differences between observed and self-reported food safety practices: A study with food handlers using structural equation modeling 23 August 2019

Food Research International

Diogo Thimoteoda Cunhaa1Veridiana Verade Rossob2Mariana BessiPereirac3ElkeStedefeldtd4

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2019.108637

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096399691930523X

Surveys still suck: Observation is much more powerful, even in nurseries in Warsaw

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I guess someone out there reads the stuff my lab produced over the past 25 years, besides my mother (we get cited in peer-reviewed papers somewhere, in ways I could never imagine, 1-3 times a day; and thanks Amy for keeping me updated).

The aim of this study was to assess the degree of conformity with food safety hygiene requirements in children’s nurseries in Warsaw over a period of 11 years and to predict the expected time to achieve full conformity. The survey was carried out in 55 nurseries using a specially designed check list containing questions regarded GMP/GHP and HACCP documentation and practice.

The results showed that the level of compliance with both GMP/GHP and HACCP standards was high in respect of documentation. However, it was much lower in the case of practice, especially HACCP. Although a constant increase in compliance with HACCP criteria was observed over the evaluated period, improvement was slow and inadequate. In 2017, compliance of HACCP practice reached only a 3.4 score. Based on food safety system improvements acquired so far, achievement of its full compliance with requirements was optimistically expected during 3 years.

Regular monitoring of compliance level and prediction of its conformity are of practical importance to improve food safety system management and to indicate the corrective actions which are necessary to eliminate the risk.

Analysis of food safety compliance in Warsaw nurseries

Food Control, Volume 96, February 2019, Pages 421-431, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2018.09.039

JoannaTrafialek, Agnieszka Domańska, Wojciech Kolanowski

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956713518305000

barfblog notifications are back. Oh and California is looking to allow folks to sell meals from their home kitchens

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Notifications are back. Or at least we think they are. For the past few weeks we’ve put some posts up, but they never made it to our subscribers. After a few weeks of trying to figure out what was up, our technical folks think they’ve figured it out.

Here’s the test post:

I spent today making a bunch of food today in a home kitchen, being videoed, for science. We’re piloting a study that we’ll launch next year and wanted to know how the script and technology was going to work. This one involves using eye-tracking hardware to see where folks look. That’s me (right, exactly as shown) trying the mock technology on (we used Google Glass for the pilot).

Below is what I made.

According to Capitol Public Radio, some Californians are lobbying the state government to allow for commercial businesses to operate out of home kitchens.

Home cooks rallied at the state Capitol Wednesday in support of AB 626, a bill that would make California the first state to permit and regulate the small-scale sale of meals from home kitchens.

Oakland farmer Brandi Mac said the bill will provide economic opportunities to women, immigrants, and people of color that live in urban communities.

“We need to figure out what are some of the ways we can be able to get to employ urban farmers,” Mac said. “You can’t make money selling lettuce. But you can [make some money] if you make a Caesar salad.”

As careful as I was, I don’t think the meal, made in a consumer home, is ready for commercial prime time.

Observing is better than asking

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Ten years ago, as a bunch of University of Guelph students were barfing in their residence bathrooms with noro, Brae Surgeoner, Doug and I hatched plot to observe hand hygiene practices in situ. We wanted test whether students in the midst of an outbreak would report they were really good at washing their hands or using sanitizer. We guessed that what they said, and what we would see, would be drastically different.

It wasn’t our first foray into observational research. A couple years before we did a bunch of secret shopping at Ontario grocery stores and interacted with associates to see what they share about food safety with patrons (us). We heard a whole bunch of nonsense. Ellen Thomas advanced this style of research by training a cadre of secret shoppers throughout the U.S. to order undercooked burgers at restaurants.

As Doug wrote a while back, ‘I view the grocery store and the restaurant as my laboratory. I watch and ask questions of people, especially front-line staff. The head of food safety back at corporate HQ may know the correct food safety answer, but are they providing support to front-line staff, the people customers are most likely to interact with?’

That lab also includes the home (or simulated home) kitchen.

Asking people what they know or do is a start. But it’s never enough. People lie, forget or don’t care. Employing other methods to confirm what they say they do is necessary to confirm actions.

So we’re working with RTI International and USDA FSIS to conduct observation research on consumer food handling behavior. FSIS announced the plans in the Federal Register for comment.

To test new consumer messaging and tailor existing messaging, FSIS can help ensure that it is effectively communicating with the public
and working to improve consumer food safety practices. This behavioral
research will provide insight into the effect FSIS consumer outreach
campaigns have on consumers’ food safety behaviors. The results of this
research will be used to enhance messaging and accompanying materials
to improve their food safety behavior. Additionally, this research will
provide useful information for tracking progress toward the goals
outlined in the FSIS Fiscal Years 2017-2021 Strategic Plan.
To inform the development of food safety communication products and
to evaluate public health education and communication activities, FSIS
is requesting approval for a new information collection to conduct
observational studies using an experimental design. Previous research
suggests that self-reported data (e.g., surveys) on consumers’ food
safety practices are unreliable, thus observational studies are a
preferred approach for collecting information on consumers’ actual food
safety practices. These observational studies will help FSIS assess
adherence to the four recommended food safety behaviors of clean,
separate, cook, and chill, and to determine whether food safety
messaging focused on those behaviors affects consumer food safety
handling behaviors and whether consumers introduce cross-contamination
during food preparation. For this 3-year study, FSIS plans to conduct
an observational study each year and to focus on a different behavior,
food and food preparation task, and food safety communication product
each year. The initial study will examine participants’ use of a food
thermometer to determine if meat and poultry products are cooked to the
proper temperatures. FSIS may decide to continue to conduct these
studies annually, and if so, will request a renewal to extend the
expiration date for the information collection request.

Pork-linked Salmonella outbreak led to 192 confirmed illnesses

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It’s MMWR day again. My favorite.

A few years ago we conducted a study in commercial kitchens where we acted as food safety voyeurs and watched 47 food handlers do their job for four days.

We counted and coded all the preparation actions we could see (in some kitchens we had 8 camera angles) and there was whole lot of cross-contamination.

One cross-contamination event per food handler.flyer_raw_pig

Per hour.

The MMWR note from the field detailing a 2015 Salmonella outbreak linked to a Washington State pork processor highlights the impacts of lots of cross-contamination.

A total of 192 confirmed cases were reported from five states; 184 (96%) occurred in Washington (Figure). Patients ranged in age from <1 to 90 years (median = 35 years), and 97 (51%) were female. Among 180 patients for whom information about hospitalization was available, 30 (17%) were hospitalized; no deaths were reported.

On the basis of cases investigated before August 2015, a supplemental questionnaire that went into more detail in addressing meat and livestock exposures was developed. Among 80 patients (42% of all confirmed cases) who were interviewed, 59 (74%) reported eating pork during the 7 days preceding illness. This was significantly higher than the most recently published (2007) Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) population survey of healthy persons, in which 43% reported eating pork in the week before they were interviewed (p <0.001) (1).

WADOH and PHSKC investigation into the source of pork traced the pork consumed by 35 (59%) of the 59 interviewed patients who reported eating pork back to a U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service–inspected pork slaughter establishment in Graham, Washington. During the outbreak period, the establishment distributed whole hogs and pork parts, primarily from five farms in Montana and one in Washington, to Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. Among the 21 interviewed patients who did not report consuming pork before becoming ill, 13 had eaten at one of two restaurants or had shopped at one market where pork from the establishment was served. During June and July 2015, PHSKC inspections of these three facilities identified potential opportunities for cross-contamination of raw pork with other meat and produce, including inadequate employee handwashing and insufficient cleaning and sanitization of food contact surfaces and utensils used for raw meat. Food and environmental sampling by PHSKC at all three facilities yielded the outbreak strains.

There’s a lot of pork cooked and consumed in restaurants across the U.S. daily. And Salmonella in pork is a known issue, but there aren’t reported pork/Salmonella outbreaks every day. My guess is that incoming pork contamination levels were out of the ordinary as well.

Medium and message: Need to frequently change handwashing signs to be effective

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I’m a food safety voyeur.

Supermarkets, farmers markets, restaurants – fancy or not – kitchens, farms, I’ve been professionally watching people for 20 years.

surprise-01Chapman likes to recount how he was invited to the GFSI Consumer Goods Forum as a last minute replacement speaker in 2013 to talk about food safety infosheets and how we evaluated them.  He said that the literature shows surprise matters when it comes to communicating risks – and a message that is up all the time, like a hand washing sign, probably doesn’t do much after the day it was posted (when it is surprising to the food handler).

The level of surprise in a message determines how successfully the information is received. In 1948, the Bell Telephone Company commissioned a study on communication as a mathematical theory to aid in the design of telephones.  In a study of brain function, Zaghloul and colleagues (2009) also showed the brain’s sensitivity to unexpected or surprising information plays a fundamental role in the learning and adoption of new behaviors.

During the Q&A session at the end of the session someone from a German retail store asked Chapman if he was suggesting that that they take down all the handwashing posters they had up, and Chapman said, yes, unless they plan on changing them every couple of days. The audience had an audible gasp.

We’ve found that posting graphical, concise food safety stories in the back kitchens of restaurants can help reduce dangerous food safety practices and create a workplace culture that values safe food.

It was the first time that a communication intervention such as food safety information sheets had been validated to work using direct video observation in eight commercial restaurant kitchens and was published in the  Journal of Food Protection.

hand_sanitizer_hospital_11We found that infosheets decreased cross-contamination events by 20 per cent, and increased handwashing attempts by 7 per cent.

Based on observations of more than 5,000 patrons at a hospital-based cafeteria, we showed that an evidence-based informational poster can increase attempts at hand hygiene.

So we gladly welcome new work on food safety messages and media in poultry processing facilities.

Signs can provide repetitive training on specific food safety practices for multicultural food processing employees. Posted signs for workers in many food processing facilities tend to be text-heavy and focus specifically on occupational hazard safety. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of newly-developed hand washing pictograms on employees’ hand washing behavior using video observation.

Five employee hand washing behaviors (soap use, wash completeness, wash time, complete rinsing, and towel use) were evaluated with (a) no intervention, company signs posted and considered the baseline; and compared to (b) hand washing behavior the next day (short term) and two weeks (long term) after experimental hand washing signs were displayed at a raw poultry slaughter facility (Facility A) and a poultry further processing facility (Facility B).

sponge.bob.handwashingBoth facilities showed a significant increase (p < 0.05) in soap use after the new sign was introduced at both short and long term time periods. There was a significant increase (p < 0.05) in washing, time of washing, and rinsing observed by Facility B employees, when baseline data was compared to the short term. This indicates that a new sign could increase hand washing compliance at least in the short term. Sign color also had a significant effect (p < 0.05) on employee behavior for washing and time of washing. Behavior for four of the five variables (soap, wash, time of wash, and towel use) was significantly different (p < 0.05) between baseline and either experimental observation period.

While signs can be a useful tool to offer as recurring food safety training for food processing employees, employees tend to revert back to old habits after several weeks.

Evaluation of how different signs affect poultry processing employees’ hand washing practices

Food Control, Volume 68, October 2016, Pages 1–6

Matthew Schroeder, Lily Yang, Joseph Eifert, Renee Boyer, Melissa Chase, Sergio Nieto-Montenegro

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956713516301244

 

Watch the chickens; predict the campy

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When I had campylobacteriosis I didn’t want to move much for fear of unleashing what was in my bowels. According to Yahoo News, chickens infected with campy also move less.

Using cameras to track how the birds move around can predict which flocks are at risk of being infected, according to research by Oxford University.images-1

Lead author of the study Dr Frances Colles, from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, said: “Humans consume nearly 60 billion chickens a year, more than any other animal.

“At the same time, there is a worldwide epidemic of human gastroenteric disease caused by campylobacter.

“It is estimated that up to four fifths of this disease originates from contaminated chicken meat.”

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed campylobacter-positive birds had less movement and different behaviour to those without the bacteria.

Professor Marian Dawkins, Professor of Animal Behaviour at Oxford University, said: “The findings are compatible with the growing evidence that campylobacter may be detrimental to chickens’ health, rather than simply being harmless gut bacteria.

“Use of this optical flow information has the potential to make a major impact on the management of commercial chicken flocks, for the benefit of producers, consumers and the birds themselves.”

Researchers collected data for 31 commercial broiler flocks and tested for the presence of campylobacter at different ages.

Surveys suck: Consumers don’t accurately report what they do in kitchen

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Research utilizing both survey and observational techniques has found that consumers do not accurately report their own food handling behaviors. The goal of this study was to objectively observe conditions related to food safety risks and sanitation in domestic kitchens in an urban environment.

survey-saysSubjects (n = 100) were recruited from Philadelphia, PA. Homes were visited over a one-year period by two trained researchers using a previously developed audit tool to document conditions related to sanitation, refrigeration, and food storage.

Potential food safety risks identified included evidence of pest infestation (65%), perishable food stored at room temperature (16%), storage of raw meat above ready-to-eat foods (97% of homes where raw meat was present), and a lack of hot running water in the kitchen (3%). Compliance with correct refrigeration practices was also low, with 43% of refrigerator temperatures ≥ 41°F, and only 4% of refrigerators containing a thermometer. Consumers of minority race/ethnicity were more likely to have evidence of pest infestation in the home, lack a dishwasher and lack a cutting board in the kitchen, while Caucasian consumers were more likely to have an animal present in the kitchen during the audit visit.

 Visual audit of food safety hazards present in homes in an urban environment

Food Protection Trends, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 290-301, July 2015

Patricia A. Borrusso, Shauna Henley, Jennifer J. Quinlan

http://www.foodprotection.org/publications/food-protection-trends/article-archive/2015-07visual-audit-of-food-safety-hazards-present-in-homes-in-an-urban-environment/