New Report Calls for Greater Use of AI, Standardized Assessments for Food Safety Culture

In recent years, there is a growing consensus in the food industry: workplace culture is essential to ensuring food safety.

But how does a company assess food safety culture, and what should they be looking at?

Earlier this month, the peer-reviewed scientific journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety published a new study examining how food safety culture has been assessed in recent years and how these assessments could be improved.

In the study, “Measuring Food Safety Culture: A Systematic Review of Questionnaire Dimensions and Validation Practices,” the authors noted that the ability to reliably measure food safety culture is “crucial for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of food companies in food safety performance, enabling them to guide continuous improvement.”

The authors state that while the meaning of FSC has been defined broadly in different studies, “in general, it refers to a shared set of assumptions, beliefs, or attitudes within an organization that impacts the food safety performance.”

They add that a strong food safety culture “provides a collective food safety mindset and behaviors, which enhances compliance with regulations, improves financial performance, reduces food safety incidents, and boosts employee engagement.”

They also wrote that while food safety management has, since the 1960s, focused increasingly on hazard identification and risk reduction procedures, “it has become clear that the implementation of technical and managerial systems alone is not sufficient to guarantee consistent food safety performance, thereby highlighting the need for a greater focus on culture and behaviors within a food business.”

The authors wrote that even the best HACCP plans can fail when the “human factor” (food safety culture) isn’t up to the task.

A growing field of research

The authors note that between 2010 and 2020, only 15 of the studies in question were published, as opposed to 16 since 2021. This suggests that “the application of FSC questionnaires has accelerated in recent years.”

The majority of the studies were conducted in Europe (15), followed by Brazil (6), the United States (4). The rest covered multiple countries.

Across the reviewed studies, a total of 7,860 respondents from 2023 companies were questioned. This included about 325 managers.

By looking at how the assessments were carried out, the researchers stated that there is “a need for more systematic and comprehensive validation practices to produce reliable, stable, and comprehensible results in future studies.”

As evidence of this growing importance, they cite the integration of food safety culture into major standards such as the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI).

The authors stated that they examined “all publicly available FSC [food safety culture] questionnaires” to draw their conclusions.

“The review provides a comprehensive picture of how FSC assessment is conceptualized and operationalized across publicly available questionnaires, highlighting both the progress and the limitations of current instruments.”

Altogether, the authors examined 31 major studies to find the commonalities in food safety culture assessment.

What did the questionnaires assess?

The researchers found that in European, U.S., and Brazilian studies, the questionnaires tended to focus on five core dimensions of food safety culture: commitment, leadership, communication, risk management, and resources.

The authors of the study stated that interest in food safety culture is not universal. It is significantly higher in high-income regions, “likely due to the presence of greater resource allocation and stronger regulatory frameworks.”

In addition, low and medium-income regions often face constraints related to capacity, infrastructure, and competing priorities, the study states.

Trouble with questionnaires

They found that questionnaires remain the most widely accepted method for assessing food safety culture.

“While using questionnaires to assess FSC is generally agreed to be an objective, scalable, and relatively efficient way to gather data from a large number of people, several challenges limit the consistency, reliability, comparability, and practical value of current measurement practices.”

Namely, they mention the lack of standardization across questionnaires, the number and type of dimensions included, the phrasing of items, and target sectors and respondents. The authors state that the review is meant to help develop and select more effective questionnaires for assessing food safety culture. They also aim to support the advancement of food safety culture as a scientific theory and its application in ensuring the safety of our food.”

They added that many of the studies lacked statistical validation for their findings. In addition, cultural differences between different testing locations make it difficult to draw universal conclusions.

The Role of AI and Greater Collaboration for Food Safety Culture

The fact that the questionnaires examined in the study were not uniform indicates the need for standardization, according to the researchers.

“Ultimately, a collaboration among academia, industry, and regulatory agencies is essential to enhance the measurement of FSC, possibly by developing a standardized and rigorous questionnaire pool. Such efforts will enable FSC to be assessed more consistently and accurately, thereby supporting proactive FSC, accountability, and continuous improvement in food safety performance.”

The authors state that further assessment of food safety culture should involve direct observation, microbiological data, and the close consideration of audit results.

In addition, they state that “Most importantly, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offers promising opportunities to strengthen FSC questionnaires and modernize the development process.”

They state that AI could be used to design or adapt questionnaires, and for testing and validating them using AI-generated virtual populations.

“Exploring these innovations will not only enhance the scientific rigor of FSC questionnaires but will also create more practical tools to drive continuous improvements in food safety performance,” the authors write.

The requirement for a robust and well-documented food safety culture assessment plan is one of the key updates in SQF Edition 10. Before audits begin in January 2027, check out this free Rootwurks guide, Building a Strong Food Safety Culture: Your Roadmap to SQF Edition 10, and see how to prepare your team.