Keeping Food Safety Front and Center

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—More and more convenience retailers are developing fresh foodservice programs, which means the importance of having a good food-safety training program in place has also increased. “If you handle food, you have a food-safety culture,” said Lone Jespersen, founder of Cultivate, on this week’s episode of Convenience Matters, “Building Food Safety Into Your Company’s Identity.”

The driving force in food-safety culture is the consistent delivery of a retailer’s food-safety requirements. “The convenience store sector is probably at that requirement’s early stage of evolution when it comes to food safety,” she said. “Unless we take that step into where food safety is just part of doing business, then we’re always going to be stuck in that mode where people get sick. I don’t know about you, [but] I’m fed up with that status quo, and I want to bring it to the next level.”

Jespersen recommended a store’s food-safety culture start at the senior level, but also filter down to each store level. A store’s subculture is “very influenced by who the store manager is, and if she is really engaged in food safety and understands the significance of it, there’s a higher likelihood that food safety will be part of the identity of that store,” she said.

Food safety boils down to these foundational elements: cleanliness and hazards.

“Get down to the basics, then find a way to explain that to those you work with that this is what it is, and this is why it’s important,” she said.

Three things about food safety at convenience stores stand out to Jespersen—agility, invisibility and proximity.

“If your store has a strong, mature food-safety culture, it’s also one where there’s generally better control and more proactivity in the store looking for risks,” she said.

Each week a new Convenience Matters episode is released. With more than 280 episodes to choose from, the podcast can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and other podcast apps and YouTube and at www.conveniencematters.com. Episodes have been downloaded more than a quarter million times by listeners around the world.

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