Employee Preparedness in Food Safety

Kudos to the lettuce industry for identifying strong food safety practices for production and designing a process to monitor them through the California Lettuce Marketing Agreement. This is a giant step forward in measuring the progress of an industry-led food safety initiative. Through this process, the industry can generate training materials, measuring tools and implementation steps to reduce contamination in lettuce fields throughout U.S. production areas.

Just looking at one aspect of the benefits of this type of industry-led monitoring program – employee training – shows us the ramifications can be far-reaching. In many cases, food safety is in the hands of the people. Whether you’re talking about workers or consumers, people can have an effect on the safety of food products.

Measure the Results

We think it is imperative that the industry mount a new campaign to train all workers in food safety – whether they might touch the food or not in the course of their work. In the work world, training usually means that an expert is transferring certain areas of knowledge or skills to a group of learners to improve their job performance.

With this new marketing order, the lettuce industry has a rare opportunity to measure improvement by establishing benchmarks for areas associated with food safety. One of those areas can be employee skills and understanding of food safety. Now is a great time to measure skills of a random number of employees for a foundational picture. After a few months, it would be informative to see how far they come after the introduction of simple training steps in food safety.

Who Should be Trained?

When I am training employees on food safety, whether they speak English or not, I try to put them in a position to relate to the consumer. I point out that they shop at the grocery store for their own families, and each of them probably assumes the food they buy is safe – the same way any consumer feels. I point out that no one expects food to cause sickness, but it can happen. This usually gets the employees’ attention and changes their frame of mind to accept the more detailed information.

Each employee has a role to play in preventing food safety breaches that could result in a contamination of the products, and they have an obligation to bring questionable situations to the attention of management. Even a remote employee like an accountant in the home office can have an important role in food safety. That accountant can speed up the approval of expenditures for food safety tools or programs for the farms or he can conduct a financial analysis to determine if one division is under-spending in comparison to other divisions or farms in the system.

Employees Benefit

If food safety is really important to a company or an industry, the subject permeates the entire organization. There has usually been some measure of value placed on that aspect of business, and preventing contamination is mandated from the top.

In the case of the lettuce industry, a devastating impact of more than $100 million in losses from last fall’s spinach and E. coli O157:H7 crisis has resulted in dramatic changes in practices. There is plenty of impetus for the industry to blanket employees with training opportunities, among other important steps.

There are many positive results that can arise from employee training:

Increased job satisfaction and morale
Increased motivation
Increased production efficiencies resulting in overall financial gains
Increased capacity to adopt new technologies and methods
Increased innovation in strategies and product design
Reduced turnover

Just think about how a tractor driver will feel after receiving training and recommending a change in practice that not only saves the company money, but improves the food safety protection of all consumers? The kind of loyalty that results from that support is hard to find.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

It is usually employees on the line who know where the source of contamination might be coming from, but no one has asked them or told them what the consequences might be. I can’t tell you how many times we hear from a line worker about something important during a simple food safety training session. It really works to educate them – they become better eyes and ears for the company.

During a third-party audit, auditors always ask about new hires – are they trained on food safety? There is no better time to start training than when someone is hired. The cost of sitting someone down for a 15-minute meeting covering all the rules of the company and including the food safety standards is minimal compared to the cost of a product recall.

Work with a professional to develop a training program if you don’t have a skilled person on board. Look at the following list to break the task down into smaller parts to make the job easier to handle. Your training package can become effective and motivational to your employees this way:
Stress training as an investment, not a cost. It can be a long-term investment in the growth and development of employees and the entire human resources department.

Promote a culture of learning by providing the resources to train and educate employees to keep your company on the top of its game.

Start out small by bringing together one crew or one group to expose them to the training to get feedback to improve the process so it becomes more effective and efficient.

Choose quality instructors and materials to make the training much more effective and lasting.
Use the right space that is conducive to learning, so everyone can focus to get the most out of the experience. Use visual aids and good materials to get the point across in multiple ways.
Make it an ongoing process by conducting more frequent training sessions throughout the year. This will work to motivate employees, keep them updated in the latest practices and keep their skill levels high.

Measure your results to keep an eye on the rate of return of training. Determine what kind of growth is a reasonable result of the training and create a method of measurement for budgeting and planning purposes.

Edith Garrett & Associates is a consulting firm specializing in helping the produce industry with third-party food safety audit preparation, fresh-cut product development, market research, marketing strategies and advertising plans. For more information, call (828) 684-3686 or visit www.edithgarrett.com.