In food safety and, well, really anything in life, it is always good to check if the actions we are taking are characterized as a valuable activity or just simply an activity. For example, if trying to lose weight and you go to the gym, that activity may be valuable (aka if you run on a treadmill, lift weights, etc.), or it may only be an activity if you simply walk around, chat with other gym-goers or slowly walk (1mph) on a treadmill. For that example, no additional calories were burned, no muscles built, etc. – it would simply be characterized as an activity, but not a valuable one. In the professional world, the equivalent is people who spend all day in meetings and/or doing email, but never really working to produce solutions, close out projects or solve any problems. We all have known one of those in our lives – workers who are incredibly busy but not very productive at all. 

Food safety can often suffer the same fate as the slow treadmill exercise, the action of the social butterfly at the gym or the busy colleague that is busy only with busy work. Just like those instances, food safety efforts can often be very active. It’s doing something in term of actions, and sometimes those actions are quite a lot – think audits, checklists, filing records, arranging samplers, coordinating harvests, maintaining traceability on paper, etc. Unfortunately, it’s not the quantity of activity that makes food safety programs worthwhile, and sadly, these check-the-box activities often are not doing much of anything in terms of improving food safety. In short, it’s a lot of activity, but not a lot of value. Furthermore, a valuable activity in food safety can change over time as other systems and functions are built out around them, or further science is uncovered. When changes happen, or the foundation that we have laid is now standard/routine, it is important to shift resources of the program so that limited efforts focus on value over time, and not activity. Regardless of how or why an action, policy or standard starts, it is critically important to check every so often to see whether our activities are only verifying that “we do what we say” versus if they are “doing what we had hoped they would do” – which, in our case, means reduces food safety and business risk. 

Easier said than done 

Having built, maintained and audited quite a few quality systems and food safety programs in my career, I can confidently say that we often design a bunch of checklists, actions to be taken and rigorous process into them to make sure they are followed and compliant. Then, we spend an inordinate amount of time completing all the items we designed, generally complaining about how inefficient and how time-consuming they are. Why did we do this to ourselves? We literally write ourselves into a compliance box. We do it to be thorough and responsible. We do it to be comprehensive. We do it to ensure food safety, right? It may be that the length, rigor and steps make things feel valuable, effective and worthwhile. With more effort, surely there is more impact. Regardless of the “why”, I am certain that the length and complexity do not directly mean value in terms of risk reduction. In fact, the routine checklists and procedure can often remove critical thinking from our day, and we and our team forget what the point of the activity was in the first place. I do think that routine and checklists are effective at delivering satisfaction that our efforts 100% meet the program’s requirements. SUCCESS!!! Look what we did!  

Well, wait just one moment…What exactly was it that we did? More importantly, did it matter that we did it?   

Authorizing quitting 

I grew up as an athlete and one thing that was instilled in me at a very young age was the grin and bear it mentality. Shoulder dislocated? Push it back in and keep playing. Pulled hamstring? Tape it up and keep pushing. I learned an invaluable skill to use mental discipline to keep momentum, keep moving forward, and align physical ability with the determination to never quit. Here’s the thing though, sometimes it is time to quit. It is time to stop and reflect on whether what we do is worth the effort. It is very possible that what was critically important at the beginning of a program or food safety plan may change over time. Why? Because the environment and structure around us has changed over time. 20+ years ago, food safety audits were relatively new and nothing in comparison to the depth of our programs today. We are, in short, different. Different can be good or bad, but to fail to recognize that efforts, hazards, risks, etc. have changed places us on a never-ending path of maintaining more and more, just adding to the program, but rarely editing it. We have added layer upon layer to our food safety and quality programs to improve and achieve the elusive continuous improvement goal. I am a huge proponent of said activities, but I am also an advocate for working smarter and not harder. 

We sit today in a different world than when many of our food safety polices and regulations were written. We are at a tipping point where technology, learning, and science have collided and new solutions we could have never dreamed of years ago linger before us, waiting to be selected. Unfortunately, one of the barriers to implementing these new solutions are our old behaviors, processes, and programs. In effect, our past compliance selves stand between us and efforts to truly identify activities that drive continuous improvement and risk reduction. We have often become our own roadblock and the thing that stands between activity versus value.  

So, at what point is it socially acceptable to stand back and quit? Is there a moment in time where the information is so great that it authorizes ourselves, or our food safety community, to say – let’s try something different. Which, in effect, means that we must let go of what we used to do to accept that those activities may not continue to be the best to achieve risk reduction. What I do know is that we must accept that even the best made, and constructed food safety standards and practices will evolve over time and there must be an inherent mechanism that questions our prior selves, sometimes decades older prior selves, to say I wish we would have done it differently.  

We also need to make it socially acceptable to quit. It doesn’t matter what the policy is – all efforts are made with the best of intentions to drive risk down, but the pause for reflection and review is just as important as the continued implementation. It is a remarkably exciting time for the confluence of technology and science to drive far more effective activities to remove the residual risk in our food supply system, but I do not believe that the systems that got us here will get us there.  

Let’s build back stronger 

Food safety practices over the past decades have been remarkably successful at building a foundation of language, understanding and protocols that have allowed the industry to address many of the low hanging fruit when it comes to food safety. I am also confident that these practices and activities won’t be remarkably effective at reducing the residual risk that remains in the system. With emphasis on what we can do, and the authorization to say that we no longer need to do some activities, we can focus on what unique and valuable actions can be applied in our systems.  

If you are a food safety professional that has long felt constrained by past routines, procedures and regulations, here is your authorization to change them. So, let’s ask again, are your programs full of activity or are they full of value? How would you know the difference? 

Western Growers Science is working on a plethora of data science and risk-based decision-making tools for the future of food safety. Efficient risk reduction requires reflection and introspection about the activities that we do every day in terms of making a safe serving event. Join us in questioning past programs, helping critically analyze where the worthwhile activities are and quantifying their value. Let’s build a community where 100% success isn’t whether we followed your program and checked all the boxes, but instead we have reduced the risk successfully and produced the safest food possible every day.