Watch: How to talk to your board of directors about food safety

Does food safety get the attention it deserves when it reaches the board of directors at food companies? Would a better approach create more proactive food safety policies?

“We know what good food safety management practices look like and by helping boards (of directors) understand the questions they should be asking we can really change the dynamic and put businesses more on the front foot [for food safety] rather than being reactive,” David Crean, former VP of Corporate R&D and Chief Science Officer, Mars Inc. said on Tuesday.

Crean’s comments came during a Food Safety Magazine webinar sponsored by Rootwurks  on Tuesday titled “How to Talk to Your Board of Directors about Food Safety,” where he was joined by Matilda Freund, Ph.D., Board member and ambassador director at GHI and former Global VP of Food Safety, Mondelez International, Roy Kirby, Ph.D., Partner, FoodSafERM and former Chief Food Safety Officer at Mondelez International, and Cliona Murphy, M.Sc., Board Director, Board Bia and former VP of Global Quality Assurance at PepsiCo.

The panel of food safety veterans covered a wide range of topics including how to position food safety as an enterprise risk with measurable financial, operational, and reputational impacts that resonate with executive leadership, the key elements of effective food safety governance, and how to create effective, risk-based reporting that bolsters board oversight and accountability.

The four also discussed a FSM article they collaborated on in August, titled “Food Safety Representation at the Board Level,” in which they wrote, “While food company boards often include expertise in areas such as finance, strategy, reputation management, and consumer trends, it is relatively uncommon for directors to possess deep food safety expertise.”

But how can management and supervisors communicate this risk to the board?

“An In-Depth Discussion is Needed”

Food safety is a top-level concern, but executives will always face competing risk-based priorities and economic concerns, such as cybersecurity threats, new regulations, tariffs, and supply chain security.

“Often a board will say their risk appetite [for food safety] is zero, but that’s impossible to achieve…an in-depth discussion is needed about how you minimize the risk to the consumer, your brand, your profit, and the long-term sustainability of the company, and that's why it needs attention on the board level,” Cliona Murphy said.

Matilda Freund said food safety is too important to be left solely to the food safety director.

“Often in companies it is left to the most senior food safety person to sort of make those risk appetite decisions when it would be better served to be discussed at a board level where you can get all the correct inputs into making a company-wide decision on how the company wants to approach the risk and how to best address measures to reduce it.”

You Don’t Need Technical Mastery

David Crean noted that “we say this is a technical area, let's leave it to the technical people, but how many times have we sat in on board meetings on really detailed accounting or financial presentations, and you could make the same argument there.”

He added that “the best questions often aren't technical; they're general. They're about: What are we gonna do about this? Are we happy with the way it's being managed? Are we learning from previous mistakes? And those questions, you know, don't need really technical depth to be asked.”

How to Get Food Safety on the Board's Agenda

To get food safety on the Board’s radar, Matilda Freund suggested a more direct approach.

“Food safety should have a more direct line to the board or at least to the very senior leadership. It’s often tucked under quality, which is tucked under R&D. And that's not the right place for food safety to sit. So, first is to try to make that connection at a higher level.

Roy Kirby stated there is a tendency for people to only dig into the details of topics they understand and know about, and that part of the problem with board-level awareness of food safety is that “people very often believe that food safety is being managed well, and while it is being managed well they don't need to pay attention to it. I think that's a mistake. I think you need to pay attention to stuff even if it's being managed well.”

“A Business Mindset"

How do you communicate these risks once you have the board’s attention?

Matilda Freund said a business mindset is key.

“You have to have a business mindset. And you have to translate risks into the effect that it will have on the business because that's what they're really interested in. And if you can't do that, you're gonna struggle because then you'll look like a technical person trying to get them interested in things that they're frankly not going to understand. You have to be able to translate it into the business and what impact it will have.”

Regarding the business aspect of food safety, Roy Kirby highlighted the risks of food safety failure and what they mean for companies.

“There is a question which we often fail to ask about food safety, which is, can you afford that risk?”

He added, “The next question is, can I survive that?”

If you missed the live broadcast of the webinar, you can still catch it on-demand here.