Communication strategies improving food safety culture

Food safety culture is defined as shared values, beliefs and norms that affect mindset and behavior toward food safety throughout the organization. A lot of information’s reaching final consumers are mainly focused on nutritional and sensory characteristics of foods but they have no real strategy to fight hazards due to food pathogens as pointed out by many surveys. Food poisoning infections and foodborne illness are frequent and represents a serious risk that may be linked to unsafe food, contamination by disease-causing microorganisms, or allergens that were not declared on the label. Food hygiene violations for cleanliness, cross contamination and improper storage can perhaps because consumers don’t have the necessary knowledge or skills. A strong food safety culture comes from stakeholders (e.g. scientists, communicators, ...) understanding the importance of making safe food, managing food safety practices but also to use innovative approaches to communicate with various consumer groups (families, students) to weave food safety practices into day-to-day activities. 

UniBA with EIT FOOD community will design and piloting educational and communication initiatives (workshop and courses) to create a chain link process who connect food production to the final consumer without interruption. In this process, will be administered short questionnaires to do a quick health check of the consumer's food safety culture and identify both strengths and areas that need improvement. To fulfil the food safety objective, will be do a checklist for change that take the consumers through the key steps in developing a good food safety culture in their daily activities including information on food safety (HACCP principles), personal hygiene, food allergies, and foodborne illness outbreak. We will share information with different community to enhance food safety efforts. Other activities will involve companies to show at the groups the safe mode to prepare and store their own food and to take action to reduce their risk of food poisoning, and achieve safe food handling behaviors (clean, separate, cook, and chill) or manage food for consumers with allergies.

Starting from the communication strategies, we expect to help consumers in understanding the importance of food safety and to equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to handle food safely. The knowledge we provide can help to decrease the number of people who become sick from foodborne illness, and in turns decrease costs of health care. Communication strategies could educate not only consumers, especially categories of high-risk subjects, but also technical food workers on food safety culture. Specific initiatives such as workshops and courses could assist consumers’ group in developing food safety policies, procedures, and activities to promote sound food safety practices throughout the daily activities.