Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-Based Food Safety Management System / Edition 1

by Frank Yiannas

Overview

Food safety awareness is at an all time high, new and emerging threats to the food supply are being recognized, and consumers are eating more and more meals prepared outside of the home. Accordingly, retail and foodservice establishments, as well as food producers at all levels of the food production chain, have a growing responsibility to ensure that proper food safety and sanitation practices are followed, thereby, safeguarding the health of their guests and customers.

Achieving food safety success in this changing environment requires going beyond traditional training, testing, and inspectional approaches to managing risks. It requires a better understanding of organizational culture and the human dimensions of food safety. To improve the food safety performance of a retail or foodservice establishment, an organization with thousands of employees, or a local community, you must change the way people do things. You must change their behavior. In fact, simply put, food safety equals behavior. When viewed from these lenses, one of the most common contributing causes of food borne disease is unsafe behavior (such as improper hand washing, cross-contamination, or undercooking food). Thus, to improve food safety, we need to better integrate food science with behavioral science and use a systems-based approach to managing food safety risk.

The importance of organizational culture, human behavior, and systems thinking is well documented in the occupational safety and health fields. However, significant contributions to the scientific literature on these topics are noticeably absent in the field of food safety.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441925008
Publisher:	Springer New York
Publication date:	12/01/2010
Series:	Food Microbiology and Food Safety Series
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2009
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.01(d)

About the Author

Frank Yiannas is the Director of Safety and Health at the Walt Disney World Corporation, Kissimmee, Florida.

Table of Contents

Looking Back to Shape the Future.- Why the Focus on Culture?.- A Systems-Based Approach to Food Safety.- Creating Food Safety Performance Expectations.- Educating and Training to Influence Behavior.- Communicating Food Safety Effectively.- Developing Food Safety Goals and Measurements.- Using Consequences to Increase or Decrease Behaviors.- Tying It All Together #x2013; Behavior-Based Food Safety Management.- Unwrapping #x2013; Thoughts on the Future of Food Safety.