7 Pillars of Food Safety Excellence

CREATE A CULTURE OF FOOD SAFETY EXCELLENCE

When it comes to food safety, every location, employee, piece of equipment, task, and food product can have an impact.

To truly achieve food safety excellence, your entire organization needs to align goals and processes. A culture of food safety ensures that every person knows their role in protecting the food your organization serves. Beyond that, it creates sustainable systems and proactive processes that keep food safety front and center at all times.

But where do you begin?

Steritech's 7 Pillars of Food Safety Excellence

To provide organizations with a framework for creating a culture of food safety, Steritech developed the 7 Pillars of Food Safety Excellence.

Building a culture of food safety certainly isn't easy. It takes hard work, diligence and buy-in at all levels. However, by using the 7 Pillars of Food Safety Excellence as core foundational elements, you can implement a successful food safety program, no matter the size of your organization.

• 1. Senior leadership commitment and engagement - Signals the expectation that food safety is a core competency for the brand and sets the foundations for building a robust food safety culture.

• 2. Food safety communications - Keeps food safety top-of-mind and reinforces expectations through consistent ongoing messaging and multi-directional communication.

• 3. Defined standards and procedures - Establishes the right way to operate and provides the foundation for consistency across multiple locations.

• 4. Training - Provides an understanding of food safety operating fundamentals and supplies context so that colleagues fully understand the potential consequences of unsafe food.

• 5. KPIs/scorecard - Focuses organizations on the most important elements of food safety, ensures broad visibility of risks and provides metrics to continually measure performance.

• 6. Oversight program - Monitors, tracks and analyzes performance to inform continuous improvement of food safety management systems, identify root causes of risks, and enable timely resolutions to protect customers as well as brand reputation.

• 7. Positive recognition - Rewards the right behaviors and establishes what's important as a cultural value of the organization.

Additional benefits of a food safety culture

The benefits of a culture of food safety excellence extend well beyond serving safe food. When your teams are fully engaged in food safety, your organization can realize a host of other positive outcomes, both at the corporate and location level, including:

• Predictive analytics
• Increased customer satisfaction scores
• Same-store sales growth

To learn more about how your organization can incorporate Steritech's 7 Pillars of Food Safety Excellence into its food safety program, contact us today.