Stop Foodborne Illness, a nonprofit organization dedicated to food safety, has published its Food Safety Culture Toolkit. The toolkit is a webpage that features resources intended to help food organizations identify and improve their food safety culture. The resources included in the toolkit are science-based, consider personal experiences, and are tailored to small- and medium-sized organizations.
The toolkit emphasizes that it is important to create an intentional strategy for developing and enhancing a culture of food safety. The also acknowledges that every organization’s food safety culture journey is different, and that developing a culture of food safety is an ongoing process of continual learning.
The toolkit comes with a disclaimer that the resources it provides are not appropriate for every company, and that the use of its resources should be based on each organization’s internal needs. At present, the toolkit has three, active subpages:
- Evaluate Your Vision: Includes guiding questions to prompt self-reflection and critical thinking among organizations about their overall company cultures
- Define and Exemplify: Includes key points and tactics to consider when developing a food safety culture and ensuring that it flourishes throughout an organization, as well as resources to assist in fostering a food safety culture, such as videos and examples of gamification
- Guiding Desired Behaviors: Includes suggestions for designing and implementing programs to recognize and reward behaviors that reinforce a positive and mature food safety culture.
The toolkit is in ongoing development and will feature more resources in the near future, such as case studies, documents, links to useful websites, and others. Stop Foodborne Illness invites stakeholders to provide constructive feedback on the toolkit at info@stopfoodborneillness.org.
