Safety-First Culture: The Changing Definition of Safety in the Food Supply Chain

“Disruption” is more than an occasional buzzword in the food supply chain. Recent, rapid changes in our global economy have challenged organizations in the food industry to respond quickly to preserve a safe food supply. However, the food supply chain is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these challenges. Disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Salmonella contamination of onions present unique opportunities to improve our collective safety culture. Many organizations within the food supply chain are stepping up to the plate with big ideas and technologies that reinforce new paradigm shifts in safety.

In response to the pandemic, a new revolutionary movement within the food supply chain has surfaced: rethinking safety compliance not as an outlier or threshold to overcome but as a primary tenet in company culture. Defining and establishing a safety-first culture is an inevitable and necessary step in the evolution of our global food supply chain, and the pandemic is an unexpected catalyst.

Safety compliance can be defined in many different ways. For our purposes, it’s the way safety is managed in a workplace, including the safety of the product, the customer, assets, employees, and the environment. The hallmark of a safety-first culture is when employees throughout the entire organization think of safety as a critical component of their day-to-day routine, a new standard in which safety involves everyone.

Safety-first culture is not an overnight process nor is it achieved by placing informational posters on the break room wall. It starts at the top and permeates throughout the organization until it is a part of the company culture as a whole. Instead of fading into the background as the latest in a series of obtrusive initiatives, safety-first culture is a total and permanent transformation in mindset. Most importantly, safety-first culture is impossible to achieve without first collecting timely, accurate data.