Influence of food safety culture on food safety performance

Food safety is of concern globally. This concern has led to a lot of effort and attention being placed in the food value chain to ensure production of safe food products. However, current measures that have been put in place to assure food safety have been unable to produce the desired results. The inadequacy of these measures has led to the postulation of Food Safety Culture (FSC) as a contributor to the insufficient safety of food products. In addition, evidence presented from cases in the food industry has suggested a link between food safety scares and an inadequate/poorly embedded FSC. However, despite its growing recognition as a contributory factor to food borne outbreaks, the FSC concept remains largely unexplored and is still built on limited conceptual foundations lacking a unifying research framework. Moreover, existing tools do not clearly reveal how FSC is measured and interventions towards a positive food FSC have not yet been validated. On the other hand, previous studies on FSC focused more on the behavioural components of FSC and did not look at the relationships and interactions with the context factors.

Aim
The aim of the project is to investigate how FSC influences food handlers’ compliance to food safety tasks and its effect on microbiological food safety.

Approach
Multidisciplinary review, food safety culture diagnostic tool, expert validation, empirical research, modelling.