Proving It Every Day: How to Build a Food Safety Culture Assessment Plan That Satisfies SQF Edition 10

Tammie Van Buren: All right, I think it is time. it is the top of the hour. So again, our webinar is proving it every day. How to build a food safety culture assessment plan that reflects how your facility actually operates. So, the first thing we're going to put up here is our FMI and SQFI antitrust statement. And so, if you'll take a moment to take a look at that. Anytime that we bring customers together or competitors together, potential competitors into the same room, we just put our antitrust statement up here as a good reminder that we're going to avoid conversations that might violate antitrust law. So, we're not going to talk about sensitive topics such as price fixing and allocating markets and boycotts and things like that. We're here today to talk about food safety culture and that is a topic that we can all talk about without violating that antitrust. So to start us off, I'm just going to start with the code for Edition 10, new requirement, a food safety culture assessment plan, 2.1.1.3 documented. You got to have it in writing. It needs to be implemented prior to your Edition 10 audit and maintained.

And I want you to kind of see those three words there. drive continuous improvement. So that's why we're doing this. and then those four bullet points there, think of those as buckets. Okay? So it's it's very important. Think of those as buckets because we're going to talk more about those buckets during this webinar. So let's look at food safety culture. hopefully some of you all have seen PDCA that cycle that a lot of food safety culture or food safety and quality experts have been utilizing for a whole lot of years. plan, do, check, act. We're going to take it one at a time and look at how it relates to food safety culture. So let's start off with the P. Let's look at that plan. so what planning are we doing? We're identifying those activities that are needed to create a positive food safety culture. And we did add the word positive in Edition 10. So keep that in mind. Okay. let's talk about the do doing we are implementing those planned activities that we just did in the previous step. So plan and do what that's what we did in addition nine.

So if we take a look at the next yeah 2.1.1.2 in both Edition 9 and Edition 10 they're focused on that planning and that doing. Okay. Edition 10 goes further. That's where we get into that check. Check is going to be the assessment of the implementation of those activities that we did just above that. So that's your food safety culture assessment plan. And then the act that's going to be driving those that continuous improvement that we mentioned in 2.1.1.3 Edition 10. So Edition 9 stopped with plan and do. Edition 10 adds on that check and act. And so hopefully maybe that will help to in your mind clarify the difference between food safety culture and food safety culture assessment plan. So how do we begin? Well, SQF gives you those four buckets, okay? Communication strategies, training programs, employee feedback, measurement, and evaluation. And then you as a site need to identify what activities that you're doing to enhance that positive food safety culture and how it fits within those four buckets. Then you need to identify the who's going to do the assessing. is it going to be done by certain individuals?

Are you going to have a maybe you have a food safety culture assessment plan? The great thing about this is that SQF 2.1.1.3 the code gives you those four buckets and then it's up to you to determine how your site figures out the rest of it. Okay? So beyond the who is the when. So am I doing my assessment daily? Am I doing it monthly? Maybe it's annual. And it's going to be broken down by activity. And then the how. How do I determine how do I assess my food safety culture activities to determine that they're they're giving me, good results. So, I'm looking at records. I'm interviewing people. I'm observing. And hopefully you all have heard that before if you've taken our auditor class. We talk about that road to RIO. And that's what it is. That's the how. Now, how does that relate to your site? So, we're going to put up a an example. and again, I want to stress this is just an example. This is Tammie thinking, if I were in a facility, here's how I would do it. That's not how you have to do it. there's many other ways that you could come up with to do it, but I've got my four buckets on the left.

I started identifying those activities that I'm doing to implement a positive food safety culture and I just started listing them and assigning them to buckets. And so you can see there food safety communication board. I think we've all seen those, right? We're we're putting information up and we're posting it. we have sometimes we have a break room that has a computer monitor that just scrolls all day long food safety information. And then you might maybe you do daily shift huddles. your production supervisor gets people together in small groups and maybe there's a food safety topic of the day. again, all examples. there's no right or wrong answer. It is really fit to what works for your site. and then you're going to, if it were me, I would assign responsibility for who's going to be the assessor. The plant manager. I just threw that in there because I think they'd be a great assessor for some of these activities. it again we would encourage you to be independent.

So the person that's responsible for the food safety communication board doesn't necessarily need to be the person assessing the results of the food safety communication board. so I would go with someone else. but again that's just good auditing practices. Okay. the frequency again by activity it's going to be different. some of you may be doing a food safety culture survey annually. So maybe that's something you assess annually or maybe twice a year. You wouldn't want to assess that daily. It wouldn't really make sense to do that. So identify the frequency that works with the activities. and then the methods. So how I'm going to assess it. So, if I were the plant manager and I was going to assess that food safety communication board, I would go look at the board, see if it has updated information on it, and then I would go and find some employees to interview to determine if they have read the board or if they understand their the information that's been provided to them. So, this is just an example to get you started. Okay. So we it can't stop there, right? You still got to document that. Okay.

So if I'm doing the assessment, then how am I documenting whether I meet the intention behind what I'm doing? And then to further take it on this slide, here's some of the questions that if I were an auditor, I might be asking you some of these questions. how are you training your food safety culture assessors? How much evidence are they supposed to record? per your own internal procedure. Do they just write nonconformances or do they identify all the information that they looked at? And then how are you handling that continuous improvement phase, that act phase? do you need to improve the P phase, the plan phase? do you need to add an activity, remove an activity that's not meeting expectations or do you simply need to improve the do phase? That's the implementation of it. so maybe it's a good activity. We need to adjust how we implemented it. Okay. So that's just to kick us off a little bit talking about food safety culture assessment plan kind of setting the stage. And now I am pleased to introduce our presenter for today. This is Jon Shuster.

He's with SafetyChain, one of our partners, if you will, in the food safety business. and I'm going to turn it over to John and let him talk to you about what Food SafetyChain does.

Jon Shuster: Yeah, thank you Tammie. Much appreciated. Thanks for that introduction. so I'm here representing SafetyChain and SafetyChain is a platform that allows users facilities to capture their compliance records and operational records in a way that is digital that goes to a cloud that's able to access, which is a little bit different than obviously a paper platform where file cabinets are used, papers are shuffled throughout the facility. When you get a moment, take a look and scan that QR code and you'll be have a have a walkthrough of SafetyChain's platform. So, now we're going to get into why we're here today and we're going to talk about the agenda. So, what are the requirements? And Tammie's talked a lot about what 2.1.1.3 already says, what it looks like from a day-to-day program in operations, and what does leadership engagement look like? And leadership is through all verticals of a facility. And remember, the focus and goal of a positive food safety culture isn't just to satisfy an auditor that shows up once a year, but it's to implement a daily culture that is followed by everyone throughout the facility from a day-to-day aspect.

And so I'm going to put a poll up here and just take a moment, read through the questions, read through the answers. So what describes what best describes your current food safety culture at your facility? just take a moment, we'll talk about it. So whether you're doing it for the very first time because of the requirements from SQF Edition 10, you have an assessment but you're not quite sure where it sits or you believe that you have an active program but it's only driven by a few individuals or by a specific department. And that poll will close here perfectly. Okay. so it looks like you've got an active program, but it's driven mainly by QA. Very common. Very, very common.

And that is exactly what we're trying to move away from to where QA and QC or just quality and food safety in general are seen as less as the authority, the policing and driver of the culture. the culture being a positive food safety, food quality culture and more of an engagement through everyone at the facility through all levels whether you're in sanitation or in maintenance or in quality or you're receiving raw materials or you're shipping finished goods out. It's really an adopted set of values that's shared through everyone that works at the facility day in and day out. So, here's an interesting stat for you is that last year about 300 facilities received a perfect score during their audits. And out of those 300, seven had recalls. So that should indicate something right. So are we operating as we say we do every day or are we only operating that way in the presence of a visitor, an auditor? Do we focus on the audits when they come and ensure we're following procedures?

We ensure that everybody's trained for, right before the audit. and that is a little bit of an alarm to anybody that is being audited that even though your score reflects that you're able to pass an audit, you still have exposure and risk to recalls. And that risk and exposure lives in your culture, right? It's when third shift is operating. It's when management isn't present on the floor. Those are the times in which we see the lack or lapse of judgment driven by a culture that allows it. And Tammie spoke to what 2.113 says. What I want you to do is where it says measures. So it says what clause what is clause 2.1.1.3 measures really what is it assess and how is it is assessing right? So it talks about communication and we'll go through these kind of one at a time. So it talks about communication. How are you communicating food safety concepts, food safety occurrences to your employees? When are you communicating? How is it communicated?

Are you simply putting a TV in your break and lunchroom and having it scroll through slides that contain some metrics about holds in the facility or your last SQF audit score or if you're this good occurrences that we see within the industry recalls information about how recalls happen, the fact that allergen and labeling issues remain one of the top reasons for a recall and how that could impact your facility. So, effective communication, not just communication, but effective communication. And this is where the assessment, right, comes into play. Is that is what we're doing effective at providing that positive food safety culture? We're assessing it. It's very similar to what you're doing with your asset plans and your CCPs, right? Every year you have to do an assessment or rather an effectiveness check at is it still effective at controlling the hazards that you are looking to control. If you're old enough like me used to be called verification validation until the change which was great. So now it's a verify and effectiveness. Verification and effectiveness. So number one are we doing it? Okay. Communicating.

Are we communicating? Yes, we're putting information up on a board. We're having meetings, pre-shift meetings. We're having perhaps by annual or quarterly town halls if we're able to, whether that be virtually or in person if you're a small enough facility, right? And then assessing that. Are people just going, "Yep, got it. Yep, got it. Okay." Are we assessing, hey, last week we talked about this? Do you remember talking about that? Having interviews with people? Is the information you're sharing relevant to them? Are they able to understand it? asking them questions about what they're reading, following up on that. So, communication, is it effective? How are you doing it? Are you doing it? Asking people about it. Usually, most of the time, people love to talk and they will tell you what they know, what they don't know. and if you're asking them to regurgitate some information that you've you've placed for them, well, then you'd be able to assess on whether or not that communication was effective. One of the things I love to communicate to the operators on the floor is what's happening in the facility. What are we finding?

What com what customer complaints are we getting? What foreign materials are we finding? and the why behind it. And we'll talk about that a little in our next segment is comprehensive training. So, usually we train someone and we have them sign off that they've been trained, which is a bare minimum when it comes to training because anybody, and this is very common, will sit there and say, "Yep, I got it. Yep, I got it. Okay, I got it." But how do that they really absorbed what it is you were trying to train them on? Are you having some sort of assessment at the end for comprehension? are you including the why behind the training? If your training is talking about allergens, are you just training on the fact that they can't use a certain colored utensil or the process they have to take if they move from one area of the facility to the other or touch one allergen and go to work on another allergen? Are you just telling them that they can't do that? Or are you providing them the why behind it? The fact that vulnerable populations exist and if we fail to do what we're being trained on, what those implic implications are.

Usually what I find is that if you educate your operators and not just tell them what to do, but give them the why behind what they're doing and what can go wrong. Then that gives them the tools, the mental comprehension to be able to make the decisions on the fly, on the floor based off of what they understand. A lot of times people don't do things maliciously. They're just trying to get their job done, trying to get through it. But if we can provide that nugget of if I don't follow this, there could be pretty severe consequences to the back end when they're under pressure. will help them understand the decision and provide the culture of I'm going to make the right decision. May not be the decision I need to make right now in terms of getting this product out the door, keeping this line up and running, but it's the right decision. Okay. So, what does your training look like?

Is it just here sign this document that you talked to me for 5 minutes and I told you some things or is it a bit more involved in assessing that going back and saying to your operators to the to the individuals that took the training maybe a month later did it stick? Do you remember what we talked about? Most of this training is annual. if you're doing it biannually that's great. If you're doing it every more if you're doing it more that's that's even better. But maybe the cadence isn't quite there yet. we're all human. We all have a lot going on in our lives, especially floor level operators. Did the training stick? Are they able to understand it? Is it comprehensive and how we're assessing that? Not just the fact that, yep, we did it. We checked the box. John signed up for showed up for training and signed off that he took the training.

The third the third is similar to number one talking about communication and but this is kind of the followup to that is collecting feedback providing a mechanism for your employees or even the environment to g to give feedback and addressing that feedback. some customers I work with have done anonymous emails, anonymous voicemails. How about the always wonderful suggestion box, right? So, and remember no feedback is feedback, which means are your employees comfortable with giving feedback? Do they care enough to give feedback? And if they do, how is it addressed? What happens to it? Do you follow up with them? Is it is it is it kind of more publicly known if appropriate, right? as a group discussion, just what does that look like? How are you doing it? Are you doing it? And if you are, how are you assessing it? Are you looking in that suggestion box once a month and saying, "Oh, there's nothing in there." Going back the next month and saying, "Oh, there's nothing in there. Oh, we don't have to do anything because we're not getting anything." Right. Well, that indicates that there is a little bit of a gap there.

And that gap is, well, no one's providing any feedback. You can't tell me if there's no feedback to be to be had. and if there is feedback, great. Once a month, we're collecting it. We're looking at it. We're reviewing it. We're getting back to that individual if we know who that individual was, if it's not anonymous, and providing that feedback. or making it public, right? Putting it up as part of a communication. Hey, this feedback was raised. we're putting it out there for communication. near misses, I think comes into this quite a quite a bit. communication and feedback. near misses aren't are aren't necessarily widely shared well because a lot of times it's addressed before it becomes a problem. maybe before quality gets involved and has to put product on hold. maybe it's line operator is verifying something that machine operator had done and it's it's not correct which had not checked would gone potentially to recall status. they go ahead and fix the problem and they move down the line and do have to put a product on hold. But how do we know that ever happened?

And I'm sure that happens quite often. are we able to collect that feedback? And we're not looking to point fingers or create the culture where we're just kind of, tattling on each other. It's we're trying to create the culture of just an open and honest discussion about what happened and how it happened so that we can understand and put feedback or mechanisms in place rather so that doesn't happen again. how many times have we been in a situation where we had to do a root cause analysis on why something happened and we come up with, well, John just didn't do his job right. He just chose to do the wrong thing. We're going to retrain John. Well, I think that indicates a cultural issue. a lack of enforcement of following policy no matter what or understanding why they couldn't and apply that culture. So and the last is just regular measurement and evaluation. are you evaluating your feedback communication loops, right? Are you looking at how all of these are providing a positive culture? Are you looking at holds? Are you looking at sanitation failures with a critical eye to culture? Right.

If we follow our procedures, they're procedures written for a purpose written to minimize risk and exposure to any negative effects. We shouldn't have any issues, but we still have issues. So, what are we what are we evaluating and measuring? What KPIs can we use to demonstrate that our culture is performing in a positive aspect? And so we did talk about this and this is really the topic of today is human behavior, right? A lot of a lot of people say, "Okay, well we have a food safety culture and we know we have a food safety culture and where it sits because we give a survey." but those surveys really just measure sentiment. How I'm feeling at the day I took that. and those are two different things is I can tell you how I feel today and I can come in next week and be in a similar situation and my behavior may be completely different. Again, awareness. Can operators, can employees, can anybody, can management explain why? Why do we do this? Why is this in place? And the why becomes why it's important. What happens if we don't understand the why? What happens if we don't follow through with what we say we do?

Do report near misses just like I had just talked about. Do we or do we just chalk it up as a oh that was that was close. those incidents, whatever they may be, are very important because those are the finite segments of your culture that if not addressed build and build and build until we're looking at a larger issue. and it's a big culture issue, right? So cultural widely accepted norms and behaviors and if not addressed can build and become a systemic issue and confidence. maybe not so much as often as you would think, but do employees feel empowered on the line or are they under pressure to keep that line operating and moving product for operations? Is operations on board? Are they okay with that? Or is there a cultural disconnect between operations and quality? Do they share the same culture? is it safe to stop the line? This is what your cultural assessment is looking to understand is are these things in line? Is there is there a gap? Are sentiments one thing and behavior another? You can talk to someone, they can say one thing, but then you can observe their behavior over time and you see a different behavior.

And so the gap I'm sorry, the assessment is really there to identify any gaps that you may have. Right? We talked about the audit cycle mode. So that is oh we have an audit in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. We slow down. We review everything to make sure it's audit ready, right? We clean up this place. We focus on fixing everything we should so that when this person shows up there's a perception and a presentation to this auditor that we operate like this on a daily basis. I think any good auditor will tell you it's pretty evident that is that's what happens. If they can see that pretty quick in the sense of a facility running like this dayto day or running like this for the few days during an audit, right? And then we go into culture first mode which is which is which is where we want to live. We want training that focuses on the why. We want the culture to support decisions by line level operators. We want the culture to support line level operators being comfortable with bringing up something that happened or bringing up something that could potentially happen.

I think I think near misses are one thing, but the potential for a near miss is another. Again, everything's based off of risk, right? We talk about that all the time, but I think line level operators have a whole different view of the risk that happens on that floor in the sense of employee behavior. Hey, every day John does this. Now, it's not a problem, but if it continues or if something small changes, then it will be a problem. We need to address it. Okay. he's not signing out something when he needs to and he's going back and doing it. or whatever the case may be. It's it's it's the potential of near misses, right? And that's when it goes into that assessment mode. Do we know that? Do we know that's that's happening? Do we know it's a possibility of it happening? How are we assessing our communication to our line level operators? How are we assessing what we're trying to drive in terms of a positive food safety culture? So your food safety culture assessment plan is aimed to highlight the gaps and these are just some areas that we've we've we've discussed.

So engagement the cycle that occurs just before an audit ends as soon as the audit ends right will highlight that well I stopped seeing the plant manager on the floor every Wednesday that's because the audit doesn't happen or they stopped asking me questions because the audit has passed. It needs to be ongoing. And if we're not committed to culturing to fostering a culture of that prolonged day-to-day engagement, hopefully your assessment will capture that should also capture surface training. That's got to be a real big one. is not only did John sit through a training, but are we assessing what he absorbed? Was he just sitting there shaking his head? Yes, I understand. To move the training along, was there an assessment? Did we follow up with John? How did he feel about the training? did you get down to why it's important for him to understand the training? Did you get down to the why it's important of the procedures that he is actually following? And if he doesn't follow it, what are the implications? What are the implications? broken feedback loop. Pretty good. highlight.

Yeah, I say something to my supervisor, but haven't heard anything about it and it's been six months. it'll highlight the fact that people want to raise concerns yet nothing occurs. And then that siloed commitment and I would I would expand that outside of management. I would also say that it's outside of quality food safety. Is it is it a commitment that's shared across all departments? maintenance. We know how those maintenance guys can be. Is it operations? Is it quality? Is it materials and receiving? and do they all share the same cultural commitment or is operations looking to just move products as fast as possible? And they are. I get it. But are they keeping it in mind that there's a commitment to a food safety culture there and it's not just one department's or management level's responsibility that it's everyone's responsibility that operates that facility. I'm going to put a poll up here yet again try and have an understanding of if someone in your facility leadership does a floor walk or quality doesn't have to be leadership necessarily just how floor walk happens. what happens with what's found?

So yeah, we note it but it just kind of stays there. We document, but followup is tough. Or are they logged, assigned, tracked, closed, or what, we don't even have a formal walk process. Some of them, some of you may be familiar with Gemba walks. perhaps that is the term that you're comfortable with. That's fine. But what happens when these walks happen? And they should they should happen. It's get out there have an understanding of what's going on in the operation floor. Great. Good. Good. Positive there. So, so the majority, a little bit more than half where findings are logged, assigned and track to closure hopefully going through your CAPA process, which is great. and it's good to see that there's just a handful of you that don't have a formal walk process. Perhaps something that you could that could be your takeaway from this is just get out there, focus on one thing, just one thing at all. Look at employee behavior. Watch people wash their hands.

Watch them walk through the for foot dips. watch how they interact with their machinery or the product that they could be touching. just observe them, see what they're doing. or talk to them. go out there with one question. One question to ask your employees and see what they say about it. It could be anything. Could be, do how many customer complaints we had last week? Do tell me one foreign material, piece of foreign material that we found within the facility. communicate with them. Just get out there and talk to them. And so food safety culture assessment is it functioning and by functioning meaning is it assessing are we assessing okay we're here to assess what we do we say for a culture for a positive culture the cadence this was something Tammie talked about at the beginning of this webinar is it happening during ing the frequency we say it's happening. Okay? Maybe the frequency needs to be adjusted. Maybe we're doing something annually that we should be doing biannually. Maybe we're doing something a little bit too often and the data we're getting is a bit skewed. Maybe we're not communicating enough.

Maybe we're not updating our information that we're communicating enough. what we're finding. Does it have a loop? Are we going through our CAPA process? If we are, who owns that? Is each one being addressed and closed? Are they being tracked? Those long-term fixes, what do those look like? Do we need outside help? How do we track that? Is that being tracked? Is it being thought of? Could we look outside the facility for help on closing some of these findings? and learning, right? So this is learning is a result of assessing. So did we learn from what we just looked at? It's the effectiveness. Does the activity produce what we want? The positive food safety culture. And are we improving? Remember, you cannot improve or act upon something if you're not able to measure it. All of this is owned by all employees. It's not owned by management. It's a commitment from all employees. This is also a minor verbiage change in SQF Edition 10 is that all employees demonstrate a commitment to food safety culture. And so think about your culture at your facilities or facilities that you're responsible for.

Is it something that's just owned by one team or is it owned by the whole organization? Is there buy-in by the whole organization? Does everyone in that facility support those shared values of a positive food safety culture? And again, we're looking to get everyone on board. Everyone has a hand in building this positive food safety culture and producing safe quality foods. So some of the some of the ways to assess training records, so documents, leadership walk logs, documentation of communication. So we went out and we talked to operators on the floor. We asked them this question. We asked them that question. Here's where our responses were. Their responses indicate that we're going in the direction we want or we have some work to do. manage management reviews. How are managers performing? How are they communicating with their employees? are they are they getting trained? Are they getting the training that they need? or are they kind of getting what their level their employees are getting? how are we training them to train their employees? Are there closed employee feedback loops? Or is there any feedback, anything at all?

Are you getting suggestions or comments about near misses or this happened yesterday or I think if we could do this we would reduce our risk a little bit better more reduction of risk and we're tracking those indicators over time right so what does that look like so this is the evidence that will be presented so we've got documentation got documentation that we talked to people. We've had these conversations and this goes to training and we've talked about this quite a bit but it is very important that not only are we saying a train a training was attended but there's some evidence to support that it is providing the cultural significance that it's designed too. Got one more poll here. And just talking about anticipating how you going to how are we going to do this? Are we going to go paper? Are we going to write it down? we have some digital tools. is it a mix? You have one digital platform. just trying to think about what we're going to be able to give to an auditor when they say, "Okay, John, I see that you went out and talked to your employees, but what did they say? Where are those responses?

What questions did you ask? what did you do with those? Is it easy for you if you're going out on the floor and writing responses down? Is it easy to take those responses back to put into something to where it's easily tracked, reported? Sometimes it's a mix of both. Like I said, it'd be great if you could hand them some sort of digital tool that says ask them the questions. okay. So, so more than 50% is a mix of paper and digital. which is which is which is fair. to where we are today with combining and documenting data from siloed departments facilities and usually we see a mix of both which is which is which is respectable. we have a little bit allin-one digital system which is great. so just quickly paper versus digital. lastly, time savings, audit prep, right? There's no translating of data from paper to digital. paper documents versus digital require some sort of middle intervention to get that data to tell you a story. And that's really what you want your data to be able to do is tell you a story. What is that story telling you? Is it saying it's working, it's not working?

Does that story indicate if it's not working quite so well where exactly you need to do some work and provide some changes, observations versus what your assessment will produce. And this is more of a rehash for making sure that if something happens, it's documented with closeout actions. feedback loops are going somewhere. On the left is general observations. On the right is where the assessment is targeted to close the gap between training, walks, conversations, communications, documenting those KPIs. So, indicators of success. What does what does a positive food safety culture look like in terms of an assessment and being able to show an improvement over time. perhaps near-miss reporting increases. We had zero. Now we have a few. Maybe it's 10. Maybe it's 20. It's not that you didn't have them before. It's just that now they're actually being reported. It's good to know conversations are increasing. Employees are not hesitant to approach management and say something, bring up a concept, ask a question, and it's self-reinforcing. So, it's not just evident just before an audit occurs. This occurs day-to-day.

This is how these facilities operate. This isn't just a show. This is true performance of how we run every single day. So finally here, go out to your floors, go out to your operations, and just ask employees if they've raised a concern in the last 30 days and if they knew what happened to it at all. You'll know right away if you didn't get a single person that didn't raise a concern or maybe you did and they just don't know what happened to it. My guess is you're get a lot of nope, didn't raise any concerns. My bet is there's some concerns out there that you should probably want to hear about. Observe a floor walk. So, just go out there. Is there followup? what is that what does that closed loop look like? And if you're building your assessment plan, incorporate these concepts. If you have an assessment plan, make sure that it's assessing those four buckets and it's functioning. Make sure it's documented. Make sure it is truly a say what you do and do what you say program. and it just doesn't exist verbally or theoretically that it's actually documented.

Tammie did a great job of illustrating how it could look with the who, what, why, when, and where type scenario, but make sure it is documented. That is the most important. And we'll stop here and we'll pause. And it's now time for any Q&A that have that have come in.

Tammie Van Buren: We do have a few and there were a couple of questions about management and so we seem to get that question during a lot of presentations, a lot of webinars, what do you do if management is completely disengaged? and to follow up. What are some strategies to get buy-in from management when they think they're supporting food safety culture, but they're not really? and the assessment's going to reveal that. I mean, you're going to identify those gaps. So, what do you think, John? What do we do with management? yeah, that's a great question. And I've I've been asked that in the past as well is h how do we get management engaged? And I think SQF has done a great job in the sense of saying, "Hey, we're going to we're going to interview your management and we're going to see what their level of engagement what their level of engagement is." And if we find that they're not as engaged as appropriate, you may be issued a nonconformance and they could be part of the problem, right? And I think honesty is the best policy when it comes to stuff like that in the sense of just being honest with your management and managers.

I've been in the uncomfortable situation of having to confront a plant manager who I reported to in the sense of them not supporting a culture that is positive for food safety. It wasn't anything personal. It was just a matter of fact from an observation. And so I would say don't be afraid. Now tone and deliverance is and the way you deliver is everything, right? so it's just being very honest. It's reinforcing what their responsibility is in supporting a positive food safety culture and the fact that it's going to be revealed so to speak, right? If they aren't behind it.

Tammie Van Buren: Yeah. Now more than ever, now that in Edition 10 they have to assess their food safety culture activities, then absolutely I think it is going to be a little bit more documented. I mean, we can have our opinions that maybe they're not being supportive. but with that food safety culture assessment, it's it's going to it's going to really highlight with facts on how that food safety culture is not being driven or supported by leadership. So, yeah. So, let me let me look to see what other questions. We've had several. John, this is one for you. someone said, "I'd like to see an example of near miss recordings." you talked about near miss recordings going up. So, do you have some examples to share that

Jon Shuster: nothing I can flash up on screen here? but I would say near miss recordings are going to come down. If it's not a documented hold, then that's going to be a conversation had with employees and then you can just simply create a document can be a something formal that can be used as a template that says, okay, it wasn't a hold, but it was a near miss. Just like you would with your holds, you're going to track what happened, how it happened, what we did to fix it, or how it was identified, right? And it doesn't have to be anything, fancy or pretty. You just have to get those facts down on in writing, whether it be, Excel, paper, whatever. Just get them down. Create a log, create a log. Who cares? Create an instance day on this day, this happened in this department with this item, right? And that's a near miss. Now, we didn't do anything about it. We didn't put anything on hold. There were no quality or food safety implications, but it's a documented near miss. And it can be that simple. Don't overthink it.

Tammie Van Buren: Yeah. Oh my gosh, the questions are coming in fast and furious. I would just add to that is I mean, I think you all probably deal with near misses every day and you just don't, we, personnel safety, we have a good, you probably have a good program for how you document near misses. somebody got a scratch on their finger instead of a laceration. That's a near miss, right? because we look at it in terms of severity. food safety, you probably have near misses every day. somebody reports that they saw a cheese cracker over on the non cheese line or somebody wasn't wearing their hairnet correctly. you could even get to that level of detail of near misses. did anybody get sick because someone didn't wear their hairnet correctly? So, I think we deal with near misses all the time. and we just don't classify them as that. So, maybe John gave you a different way to look at those things going on. So, and someone even suggested that maybe process adjustments might be considered near misses. let's see. somebody asked, are audit scores going away? Well, that's a, that's a question for another webinar.

U, but in the short answer is no. we still do have a score, but we changed up the rating system. So, check that out. part A, it will walk you through that. We did a webinar recently that talked about a lot of the changes just in general in Edition 10 a couple weeks ago. So, that's available on our website and we go in depth about scoring there. So, feel free to check out that webinar that we did a couple weeks ago. let's see what else can I get in. We've got three minutes left. how can a survey be adapted to gauge behavior instead of sentiment? So, you talked about the difference between behavior and sentiment. So, how can you, adjust that survey so that people are not talking about, well, I feel that our food safety culture is bad, but instead focused on the behaviors that make it so. Yeah, I would I would take a look at the questions and the way you're asking them to answer. generally it's like I feel do you feel safe, raising a food safety concern? Yes. No. Have you done it in the past? Yes. No. Maybe more situational type questions to assess how they would behave and have honest questions and answers.

I think that is probably a really good route instead of open-ended yes no questions. Would you do this? would you do that? Is it okay to do this? Ask them, here's the scenario. What would you do in this scenario? Maybe not give them multiple choice answers and ask them to kind of explain what they would do. and also, everybody's going to say, everybody's going to tell you, yes, I'm going to do exactly the right thing. Of course, they would. And just try to you're not looking to put to put somebody in a bad spot. You were just trying to gauge behavior. Encourage honesty. Encourage honesty. some people be a little bit too honest. Some people won't be honest at all. But and I know that's it's a broad as I'm saying it, but you want to encourage honesty. And very honestly, they would appreciate that, right? They just they you're just trying to assess how to how to get their how to how their brain's going to work in a certain scenario in a very realistic situation. Hey, look, you've been working overtime. You got to you got to work another two more hours to get this order fulfilled. Somebody finds something on the line. What would you do?

Honestly, what would you do? and that's that's really what you're trying to get to the heart of the matter of is trying to understand, their behavior at that time and the truth, right? The truth.

Tammie Van Buren: Yeah. Exactly. That's what we're always looking for. I tell people all the time, I'm not going to be near as mad if you tell me the truth as I am later if I find out you did not tell me the truth. And then I'm really going to be upset about it. So, we are at the top of the hour. one more question. let's see. how does nope, we've already talked about that one. someone we were on the topic of surveys and someone says, "We conduct anonymous surveys. Do we also need to have a program now called culture survey?" So, we've maintained through Edition 9 that you do not have to do a food safety culture survey. That is not a requirement within the SQF code. A food safety culture survey is a tool that might provide you some valuable information and it may not. it really does depend on your site as we've talked about the questions, how you're asking them, are you getting sentiments, are you getting behaviors, things like that. so and you don't have to have a survey. and don't look at the assessment plan as a survey. That's not what it is. And so hopefully you all got some great information today.

John, I think the last slide has some contact information on it. so feel free to reach out to SQFI. you can get me at compliance sqfi.com. happy to answer your technical questions on the code and the new requirements. If you're interested in what SafetyChain does, feel free to reach out. Their contact information, their website is there, safetychain.com. Thank you all again for joining us. You will get a copy of this recording in the email that you registered with. So, whatever email address you use, that's where you'll get it. But we will also be posting it on our website. check out the webinars we already have posted there at sqfi.com there is a page dedicated to webinars and in case you didn't know I don't know John did sqfi has a YouTube channel and we have so many past webinars posted there some it's really great information so check us out but again thank you all for joining us today thank you everyone.