A strong food safety culture protects consumer health, ensures compliance and builds public trust. This guide provides tools and background information to help your business strengthen food safety practices.
What is food safety culture?
Food safety culture is the shared attitudes, values, and behaviours staff bring to food safety. In short: “It’s how we do things around here.”
Why food safety culture matters
Culture is powerful. Even with inspections and procedures in place, a weak culture can lead to food handling shortcuts, errors, apathy and potentially serious consequences.
Benefits of a strong culture:
- Protects consumers: Safe food reduces risk of foodborne illness.
- Ensures compliance: Meets local, national and international regulations.
- Builds trust: Enhances reputation and consumer loyalty.
- Supports business success: Improves workplace safety and reduces staff turnover.
Getting started
You don’t need to tackle everything at once. Start with small, practical steps:
- Assess your current culture: Review inspection results and gather employee feedback.
- Engage your team: Hold a meeting to explain why food safety culture matters. Listen to staff input.
- Assign responsibility: Form a food safety team or designate a “food safety culture lead.”
- Improve training levels:
- Certify as many employees as possible. Aim for 100% certification.
- Train supervisors at the advanced level.
- Set expectations early: Provide new-employee training, food safety handbooks and clear, documented practices and policies.
- Lead by example: Managers should conduct daily walkthroughs (these can be formal (documented), informal, daily, or multiple times in the day), acknowledge positives and fix issues immediately.
- Make food safety visible: Post inspection reports and share customer feedback.
- Keep momentum:
- Run weekly pre-shift huddles with a rotating spotlight topic.
- Celebrate wins and reassess progress regularly.
Pro tip: Think of food safety culture as a marathon, not a sprint.
The Role of Public Health Inspectors (PHIs)
PHIs provide support and guidance, conduct inspections and ensure compliance but they should not be the drivers of your company’s culture. A strong culture means every team member thinks like a health inspector.
Eight signs your culture is strong:
- Staff consistently follow food safety practices, even when not being watched.
- Staff correct and encourage each other on food safety.
- Training is ongoing (formal and informal), rather than a one-time event.
- Food handler certification levels exceed the minimum number required and owners and supervisors have advanced certification training.
- No repeat violations. Infractions from public health are fixed permanently.
- Owners/managers are engaged and involved during inspections.
- Facility is clean, fully equipped and well maintained.
- PHIs are seen as partners and supports, not adversaries.
Additional Resources
There are many free food safety culture on-line resources available.