Food Safety = Behavior

Achieving food safety success in today’s changing food system requires going beyond traditional training, testing, and inspectional approaches to managing risks. It requires a better understanding of the human dimensions of food safety. In the field of food safety today, there is much documented about specific microbes, time/temperature processes, post-process contamination, and HACCP–things often called the hard sciences. There is not much published or discussed related to human behavior–often referred to as the “soft stuff.” However, looking at foodborne disease trends over the past few decades and published regulatory out-of-compliance rates of food safety risk factors, it’s clear that the soft stuff is still the hard stuff.

Despite the fact that thousands of employees have been trained in food safety around the world, millions have been spent globally on food safety research, and countless inspections and tests have been performed at home and abroad, food safety remains a significant public health challenge.   If you are trying to improve the food safety performance of an organization, industry, or region of the world, what you are really trying to do is change peoples’ behaviors.  Simply put, food safety equals behavior.  This truth is the fundamental premise upon which this entire book is based. 

The ability to influence human behavior is well documented in the behavioral and social sciences. However, significant contributions to the scientific literature in the field of food safety are noticeably absent. This book will help advance the science by being the first significant collection of 30 proven behavioral science techniques, and be the first to show how these techniques can be applied to enhance employee compliance with desired food safety behaviors and make food safety the social norm in any organization.

The Food Microbiology and Food Safety series is published in conjunction with theInternational Association for Food Protection, a non-profit association for food safety professionals. Dedicated to the life-long educational needs of its Members, IAFP provides an information network through its two scientific journals (Food Protection Trends and Journal of Food Protection), its educational Annual Meeting, international meetings and symposia, and interaction between food safety professionals. 

About the Author:

In addition to working for well-known global brands, Frank Yiannas is the author of Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-Based Food Safety Management System, Past President of the International Association for Food Protection, and recipient of the 2007 NSF Lifetime Achievement Award for Leadership in Food Safety.