New food safety culture service launches for food manufacturers

Instinctif Partners is launching a service for the food industry designed to enhance food safety culture, which puts driving cultural and individual behavioural change in food manufacturing at its heart.

The service will help food manufacturers meet the food safety culture challenge set out in the newly-published BRC Global Food Safety Standard Issue 8 (BRC8). This places a strong emphasis on developing a food safety and quality culture, meaning food manufacturing businesses subject to their first audit under the new Standard from February 2019, are facing a new challenge.

Victoria Cross, Head of Instinctif Partners’ Business Resilience Practice explains: “BRC8 specifies that senior management ‘shall define and maintain a clear plan for the development and continuing improvement of a food safety and quality culture’.

“Having a strong food safety culture is central to preventing product recalls. With the root cause of many food safety issues being human error, the focus has to be on people and cultural and behavioural change.”

Inspiring people to do the right things at the right time is key to creating a food safety culture – and is an essential part of the new Instinctif Partners’ service.

Victoria continues: “Our offering has been developed in partnership with Carrie Birmingham, a leading expert in culture change and employee psychology, and leading food research and technology organisation Campden BRI, and will be delivered in collaboration with a team of senior food industry experts with decades of hands-on manufacturing experience.

“Together we focus on inspiring people to do the right things at the right time – not because they have to but because they want to.”

The Enhancing Food Safety Culture service asks:

• Do your leaders inspire and reward the right food safety behaviours?
• Are your first-line supervisors leading by example – or avoiding issues?
• Are your operatives motivated to do the right thing – or just going through the motions?
• Do you have a culture of learning from near misses – or hoping for the best?
• Has ‘human error’ ever caused a food safety incident?

“You can’t force change in people, but you can inspire it; creating a culture which not only enhances food safety, but which also helps businesses become more resilient” concludes Victoria.

Diagram demonstrating the process undertaken as part of the Enhancing Food Safety Culture service for food manufacturers.