Developing food safety cultures – are small catering businesses being neglected?

Abstract

Food safety training, HACCP and safety policies are wasted if food safety cultures are absent. Food safety professionals discuss these cultures but their ideas are not always translated into tangible support, training, and materials for small independent catering businesses. Euan MacAuslan, Senior Training Advisor, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, discusses some of the problems and possible options to help these businesses.Food safety professionals (enforcers, advisors, academics, and trainers) increasingly realise the importance of food safety cultures (FSCs), as food safety pressures continue to increase. How do small catering businesses (SCBs) benefit from this concept to improve food safety? SCBs make up approximately 76% of the total hospitality businesses in the United Kingdom,1 and pressures on business margins lead to risk taking. A move away from a certification culture to one of a FSC would be beneficial for all; however, SCB managers receive very little support or guidance about how they can develop a FSC. SCB-friendly publications or training interventions about FSC are rare, and should be introduced covering topics on people skills, behavioural change, motivation, resources, and setting standards.The report into the 2005 Welsh Escherichia coli O157 outbreak stated 'The FSC for a business serving high-risk food was completely inadequate and would not have controlled the risk of cross-contamination'. It recommended that 'Additional resources should be made available to ensure that all food businesses in Wales understand and use the HACCP approach and have in place an effective...safety management system which is embedded in working culture...'2 There is no mention of training or informing owners about the concept of that 'working culture', or FSC, which is '...the aggregation of the prevailing relatively constant, learned, shared attitudes, values and beliefs contributing to the hygiene behaviours used in a particular food handling environment'.3 A total of 37% of respondents to a survey stated, 'I carry out all appropriate food safety behaviours at all times'. A total of 95% of respondents received food hygiene training, and 63% admitted to sometimes not carrying out food safety behaviours.4 Trained food handlers are not necessarily safe food handlers, and everyone in a business must take ownership of food safety.A FSC gives employees a sense of purpose in maintaining food safety standards. Managers must fully understand their roles in helping food handlers to turn theory taught in a training room into supervised practical implementation. Unfortunately, managers rely too much on external trainers and certificates at the moment, and not all have an understanding of the needs of their staffor behavioural management skills. A lack of communication between decision makers and risk takers or observers is a management failure that contributes to food poisoning outbreaks. Managers must identify and eliminate conflicts between best practice and actual working practices, which arise because of management and commercial requirements. They should also ensure that supervisors and employees have the means, resources, and knowledge to carry out instructions on good practice.5 Managers require the knowledge and understanding about their circle of responsibility, namely, setting standards, providing resources, implementing and devising systems to achieve those standards, communicating the standards with their staff, motivating and training their staff, effectively supervising, monitoring, analysing, comparing, adjusting, and improving performance.6 Keeping staffmotivated and introducing beneficial training can be achieved with an understanding of team building and behavioural change.Maybe FSC training for managers at Level 2 is the next step, not necessarily via a qualification route. Effective food safety training issues associated with SCBs are well documented, for example, a lack of supervised practical implementation, languages, literacy, education, staffturnover, low wages, and cultural differences7,8,9 and ethnic cultural values in SCBs tend to widely influence the way businesses are run. …