The importance of culture is becoming increasingly recognised in assisting with the effective implementation of food safety best practices and in helping to prevent food safety incidents and quality issues. This white paper discusses some of the challenges you might face when trying to improve the culture of your business and how you might overcome them. In particular, it examines the importance of root cause analysis when it comes to understanding why somebody behaved in a particular way as well as the impact that the nationality and generation of the workforce can have on culture. It provides some practical examples of how different nationalities respond best to feedback, communication, leadership styles and other key issues and includes some useful resources to help you understand the differences in attitudes and behaviours.

Improving food safety culture was named as the top training goal by almost 80% of food and drink manufacturers and processors surveyed in the fourth annual global survey of food safety training.

Companies are interested in understanding how they can improve their food safety and quality culture for a number of reasons:

• To be audit-ready at all times to cope with the rising number of unannounced audits
• It’s a next step following a top audit score
• It’s a way to improve, generally
• They understand that it is a critical success factor
• To gain trust and support earned recognition with/by their clients or authorities

You can only improve things effectively if you can measure them. When it comes to a “fluffy” concept like culture, it can be quite challenging.

In our previous white paper, we introduced our Culture Excellence assessment tool which enables companies to characterise their food safety culture. The programme was developed in partnership with TSI and is being used across the whole food chain - from farm to retail/food service - in Europe, Middle East, North America and Australasia.