This book helps in Achieving food safety success which 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, much is
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. Why is that?
Because to improve food safety, we must realize that it's more than just
food science; it's the behavioral sciences, too. In fact, simply put,
food safety equals behavior. This is the fundamental principle of this
book. If you are trying to improve the food safety performance of a
retail or food service establishment, an organization with thousands of
employees, or a local community, what you are really trying to do is
change people's behavior. 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 50 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.