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Tune in every Tuesday for a brand new episode of Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast. Join Francine L. Shaw, the savvy CEO of Savvy Food Safety, and Matthew Regusci, compliance connoisseur and founder of Fostering Compliance, as they serve up the latest in food safety with a side of laughter.
Explore the ins and outs of food systems, responsible food practices, and food safety regulations. Stay informed about food safety awareness and the not-so-occasional food recall. Delve deep into the complexities of the food supply chain with our dynamic duo, who blend expert insights with a pinch of food safety humor. Whether you're knee-deep in the food safety industry or just passionate about what's on your plate, this podcast promises a fresh take on staying safe while eating well.
Expect candid conversations, personal anecdotes, and occasional guest appearances that spice up the discussion. Shaw and Regusci bring their combined decades of experience to the table, making each episode as informative as it is entertaining. From industry trends to must-know food safety news and regulations, they've got your back (and your lunch).
In essence, Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast is not just about imparting information; it's about fostering a culture of food safety. By shedding light on the intricacies of the food supply chain and the latest food safety news, it aims to promote awareness and encourage responsible food practices among consumers and industry professionals alike.
When it comes to food safety, knowledge is power, and a good laugh is the best seasoning. At the heart of every episode is one golden rule: Don't Eat Poop!
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Francine L Shaw: My favorite line in this whole article, I think is temporary workers don't create these failures. They expose conditions of the system they entered. That is so true. It's not the temporary employees that come in that cause problems. Those problems already existed and so often they're the ones that are getting the blame for the failures that occur, and they walked into a system that was already failing.
intro: Everybody's gotta eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine l Shaw and Matt Regus for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't. Eat poop. [00:01:00] Don't eat poop.
Matt Regusci: Hello? Hello, Francine.
Francine L Shaw: Hi, Matt.
Matt Regusci: Oh man. It's been a crazy month. It always is crazy. After the holidays, everybody needs your attention 'cause they didn't do anything for like three weeks.
Francine L Shaw: Right. Update that it is a new month. We're now into February.
Matt Regusci: If we are now into February.
Francine L Shaw: Which that means, you know what?
Our anniversary's coming up.
Matt Regusci: Oh, that is true. Valentine's Day is our anniversary.
Francine L Shaw: It is Valentine's Day. How sweet as well.
Matt Regusci: It's Valentine's Day. I know. I gotta celebrate Valentine's Day with you, Francine.
Francine L Shaw: Yeah, three years.
Matt Regusci: What type of things do you do with your husband on Valentine's Day?
Francine L Shaw: It's not a lot. We celebrate Valentine's Day, but we don't, there's not really anywhere close to go, but.
My husband's very sweet. He really is. He usually gets me candy or flowers or something. Yeah, should buy him a card or get him [00:02:00] something.
Matt Regusci: It's funny, the romantic in my wife's and my relationship is definitely me. I, my wife is very, very British, let's put it that way.
Grew up very Midwest, British and I grew up very Italian. Very different. Let's just say her life was a lot more stable probably because, so there was no like high upside downs, like anything like that. But it's funny 'cause my father-in-law is a lot like my wife and my mother-in-law is more like me.
So my mother-in-law loves flowers. My wife is more like, why are you getting me flowers or just going to die type of person, right? So I will get my mother-in-law flowers. Not my wife, like generally.
And one time my father-in-law got my mother-in-law flowers. 'cause you know, she likes flowers and she comes out [00:03:00] into the living room and she's like, Matt, thank you. That bouquet is so beautiful. And I'm like, what bouquet? And my father-in-law is like, you're welcome.
Francine L Shaw: So. I sent my husband this TikTok the other day that it was so funny. It was like the expectation, and this guy had picked up his wife to carry her out the door, and on the way out the door, he banged her head on the doorframe and it said, the reality.
Matt Regusci: Sounds abusive.
Francine L Shaw: It was an accident. I mean, didn't mean to hit her. It was an accident. He hit her head on the doorway on the way out. It was like, that's exactly what would happen. He was trying to be nice. He picks her up to carry her out the door and on the way out he accidentally hits her head.
Matt Regusci: Oh, got it.
Francine L Shaw: Yes. It was hysterical.
No, it was not abusive at all. It was very funny. And they ended up on the floor laughing because you know, it was like he was trying to be very nice and on the way out he hit her head on the doorframe, like that's exactly what [00:04:00] would happen.
Matt Regusci: No good deed goes unpunished.
Well, today we're gonna be talking about other than Valentine's Day.
Food industry training programs.
Francine L Shaw: Right.
Matt Regusci: There was a really interesting article written by a Azure Edwards, I think that's how you pronounce her first name, Azure. She, I think she writes pretty frequently for food safety news, like as an opinion piece. Think we've read some of her like other articles in the past, but she wrote an article that caught Francine's and my eye because she's talking about the same stuff that we talk about all the time.
The piece is titled, "The Food Industry's Training Problem is the System It Keeps Paying For", and the premise of the article is that the food safety industry uses a carrot and a stick approach to food [00:05:00] safety. Like food safety training. And then they go and they check to make sure that people are doing the job correctly.
And if they do the job correctly for a certain amount of weeks, they get pizza parties. If they don't do it correctly, food safety or quality wise, they get talking to or whatever. And her whole entire premise is really, you should be looking at it holistically as a culture. And it really explaining the why.
And Francine, I know you were excited about this article 'cause that's like what you talk about all the time.
Francine L Shaw: And she does a great job of explaining it. I've commented on many of her articles on LinkedIn and she does a great job of explaining things as she writes her articles. And one of the first things that get, and I say this all the time, one of the first things that gets cut when companies are cutting is labor. Mm-hmm. And with labor training gets [00:06:00] cut because you lose your orientation hours, which training happens during orientation. And she addresses that in this article. If training isn't done well, so much is affected.
And again, she addresses that as she writes this and everything from sanitation and labeling food products and everything else throughout the culture in the facility is affected. My favorite line in this whole article, I think is "temporary workers don't create these failures. They expose conditions of the system they entered."
Matt Regusci: Oh yeah.
Francine L Shaw: That is so true. It's not the temporary employees that come in that cause problems. Those problems already existed. And so often they're the ones that are getting the blame for the failures that occur. And they walked into a system that was already failing.
Matt Regusci: Yeah. [00:07:00] Yes. And that's right below the intro. I'm gonna read the first couple of paragraphs 'cause I think it'll set the tone for the conversation.
And she does a fantastic, she's a great writer. She does a fantastic job of introducing the problem very quickly and then talking about the solution. She says, "the food industry does not lack awareness. When it comes to training challenges, ask almost anyone inside a manufacturing operation, and the same issues surface quickly, limited time, inconsistent retention, language barriers, stretched supervisors, and a fragile food safety culture. Temporary and seasonal workers often sit at the center of that conversation, framed as both essential and risky."
Man. She nailed that. That is exactly what happens.
Then the next part says, "Industry surveys, webinars and guidance documents enforce the same conclusion. Training is rushed. Errors cluster [00:08:00] around sanitation and changeovers and food safety culture weakens under pressure. These incidents are frequently attributed to human error, but what is less often examined is why these problems persist. How expensive the status quo has become." And then she follows up with, "I've worked with many companies where training programs technically meet requirements, metrics appear acceptable. The audits we're passing with flying colors, yet the same fee failures surfaced again and again. Mislabeling products during line and shift changes, sanitation errors, formulation, and process oversights and food defense vulnerabilities."
Francine L Shaw: Right.
And the reason that the food safety culture weakens under pressure is because it's really not there to begin with.
The foundation just isn't strong to begin with because the companies have not done the work that they need to do [00:09:00] to firm that foundation. And you and I talk about this on a regular basis, if you don't put in the time, the effort, and the investment to strengthen that foundation. You're never going to get where you need to be with the food safety culture.
It's a company culture. The company culture is not where it needs to be, and if you don't have the company culture, you're never gonna have the food safety culture.
Matt Regusci: They have a food safety culture. Every company has a food safety culture.
It just may not be a good one. And when your systems are taxed, whether that be through budget cuts because business is not going well, or that goes through increased shifts because business is going very well, that taxes your operational efficiencies, and then from that taxing of operational efficiencies, what gets left out.
Is it the operations? Probably not, right? They're trying to get that product out and moved [00:10:00] and maintain margins. What tends to be missed is the food safety aspect of things. That means the company's food safety culture is below the operational expectations.
Francine L Shaw: And this isn't limited to one specific industry.
Like no industry needs to be pointing fingers. This isn't limited to one specific industry. This is across the board.
Matt Regusci: It's across the board, and it's the same with service providers that are assisting these companies as well. So if you are, have a perfectly good food safety culture and you're growing super fast and everything operationally is humming, you have some problems.
Everybody has growing pains or whatever, but the food safety culture is absolutely amazing and you're providing the best product possible out of your plant. Your ingredient suppliers could be going through this problem, right? So are the COAs accurate from your ingredient supplier? Are they going through [00:11:00] huge growth or.
Having huge problems with growth and they're cutting back on things. We saw this with the ByHeart one. It wasn't the ByHeart facility that was the issue. It was their ingredient supplier that was the issue. Ultimately, it still comes back on the brand, but you know what's going on food safety culture downstream will affect your food safety culture upstream.
Francine L Shaw: And I mean, we can even go out as far as like certification bodies. Yes. We can talk about the people coming in and doing the training for these companies if they're not training in-house. It's just a plethora of individuals and people that are involved in the entire system.
Matt Regusci: We saw that at, when you say certification bodies, I went through that with our ISO 17 0 6 5 audits.
So every certification body has to go through ISO 17 0 6 5 audits moved over to an a new company. It was very small. Very small. This was many years ago. [00:12:00] NCSI then was bought by BSI. Then it became WQS, which my partner and I built up when it was NCSI. We started doing Primus GFS audits, and we had very few Primus GFS audits, I think maybe 20, 30.
And the ISO 17 0 6 5 auditor, great guy. At the end of it was like, this is the first time I've ever done this. You guys got the a hundred percent on your, but there was no nonconformities. Why was there no non-conformances? There was no non non-conformances because we were doing like a hundred primus GFS audits in that year.
So the systems were beautiful. The auditors did a great job. Reports were 100% on time. Certification decision was 100% on time, 'cause the volumes were very low. He said to us, okay Matt, you are going to grow this company. Let's see if you can do this the next year. And we couldn't. We grew [00:13:00] it from like a hundred Primus GFS audits and maybe a hundred global gap audits to something like 1,012 hundred Primus GFS audits and 150, 200 Global GAP audits.
And our systems got taxed. We had to update and upbringing, and the auditor wasn't the issue. It was our processes, our systems that were the issue. So certification became delayed, timing came delayed, tech reviews became delayed. And that happens and it happens with whatever organization.
And I love that she uses the temporary workers and the seasonal workers as a stress test for your food safety culture. If there's an issue with your facility during these peak times, it's not your seasonal and temporary workers that are the issue. It's your systems that are the issue. I would agree with that. Now, obviously there's going to be some employees that are [00:14:00] gonna be hard to change practices, to change minds, to change all that different type of stuff.
People are people, but if it's across the board a systemic issue. Then it's probably not just the individuals, it's the systems.
Francine L Shaw: Right. I was telling Melissa this morning before I came to work, I was reading a thread. Somebody was getting ready to take an ANSI certified exam. They had to study for this exam, and they had the book, but the book didn't have the answers to the end of the chapter questions.
All you have to do. Let's just say minimal effort. All you have to do is look through the chapters, highlight the important, pull out the answers to the end of the chapter questions, and answer the questions. 'cause you've gotta pass this exam. At the end of the day, they're looking for somebody to provide [00:15:00] them the answers to the questions at the end of the chapter. That's what they were looking for. This stuff, just infuriates me.
So they were trying to find out where they can get these answers. Now, you can't legitimately get these answers unless a proctor, or I'm sorry, an instructor gives them to you because it's, they're not the exam answers, they're the answers to the actual book. Because apparently what they wanna do then is they think that they can study these questions at the end of each chapter in the coursebook and pass the test.
That's not gonna work. That just, that's not gonna work. You need to learn the information. You have to learn this information because it's important information because we're talking about food safety, which at the end of the day is important because you can make somebody sick or kill someone.
People just don't understand that they don't [00:16:00] get it. So they're looking for somebody to either buy these answers for this coursebook, either to get them through the class that they're taking in university or high school or whatever it may be, rather than do the actual flipping work themselves. The lack of integrity in people blows my mind. Just like, again, that person that wanted me to Create HACCP certificates for them about a year or two ago.
Matt Regusci: It leads into this next another paragraph that I'm looking at that she wrote that I just, I really liked. "Culture's not what's written in a policy or posted on a wall. It's what people observe and internalize under pressure. When orientation is rushed, expectations are implicit, and accountability is situational workers, especially temporary ones quickly learn what truly matters. Speed over caution, silence over escalation, and getting through the shift without conflict." It goes back to your point of just [00:17:00] give me the answers, right? So much of food safety training is, here are all the bullet points that you need to know. Can you please regurgitate it back?
But so few are why is this important to know? What is the reasons why we are doing this? And really truly, is it situationally okay to not abide by these expectations if we need to get product out super fast or whatever? And if the answer is yes, it is situationally, okay, then it will always be okay.
Francine L Shaw: And I think that's what we're missing. And I, again, I've said this over and over for a number of years, that's what we're missing. We're missing the why. So many times people don't discuss the why. The why is missing. Why is this important? Many times employees are given the how, but they're not given the why.
Just it's just do this, not why we're gonna do this. This is just the [00:18:00] way it's done. This is how you're gonna do it, but never given the why we do it this way.
Matt Regusci: That is the key as she writes here. "When food safety culture is reinforced primarily through rewards and corrections, rather than a shared responsibility and clarity, it becomes transactional. Engagement fluctuates. Retention suffers. Leadership spends more time correcting behaviors than leading systems. Turnover remains high, driving additional hiring, training, agency fees, and overtime. Those costs are compounded when the workforce most relied upon is also the most socially and economically vulnerable, especially in moments when external instability follows workers onto the floor."
I love that phrase. When food safety culture is reinforced primarily through rewards and corrections, rather than a shared responsibility and clarity, it becomes transactional. And if something's transactional, it becomes more or less [00:19:00] expensive, depending upon the timing, right? So if, okay, food safety matters when we're slow, let's make sure we really follow the stuff.
When the shift is moving really fast, oh, it's okay, let's just move on. Let's just move on. That is also a transaction. And so if food safety becomes cheaper, the busier we are expectations and more expensive, the, the less busier we are, more valuable, let's say the less busier we are. Then as the company grows and becomes more busy, then that transaction becomes less valuable.
Francine L Shaw: It matters when we're slower, when we're being audited or inspected, that's when it matters.
Matt Regusci: Yes. When the auditor is here, everybody do what we trained you to do.
Francine L Shaw: I literally worked for a man that had two sets of policies and procedures. One for when we were there alone and [00:20:00] another for when there was an executive or the health department was there.
Literally, that's how we were trained.
Matt Regusci: You had a different what?
Francine L Shaw: Sets of policies and procedures. Yes, methods of doing things. I know that you know what policies and procedures are. Yes, but when reverting back to my training, when we had no executives, no auditors, no inspectors there, we did things one way.
When somebody walked in the door, we flipped into another set of policies and procedures, which were the correct ways.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, that's a different way of looking at it transactionally.
Francine L Shaw: The people that are successful are the ones that don't operate in that manner.
Matt Regusci: Really, truly. It's interesting when you say the people that are most successful, I think long term, that is absolutely correct.
It depends upon how a company deems success, right? Because there are plenty of companies out there, a lot of them, where the owners just really. A good [00:21:00] food safety culture comes from the top. A bad food safety culture comes from the top. Everything comes from the top. What is it that the owners value? If the owners value food safety and quality over the highest margin possible, then long term, that company actually will be more successful because their customers are gonna want to do business with them for a long period of time.
They're not churning customers. The customers are gonna value and respect their COAs. They're gonna believe their COAs. You're not gonna end up in an outbreak and ruin your brand and have huge lawsuits. There's a lot of long-term benefits of this.
Francine L Shaw: Recall.
Matt Regusci: Short term though, you could lose out because you're not going to be the least expensive.
You're not going to be. So you could lose out to contracts and bids. Because you value that, but the ones that value that your customers, that value that are going to stay with you the longest. And so it's interesting [00:22:00] because that's also transactional.
Francine L Shaw: Right. And the cost. We just did a podcast recently that talks about the cost.
It's $74.7 billion a year. That's the cost.
Matt Regusci: Yes. That didn't include everything either. It included a lot of stuff, but that didn't include everything.
Francine L Shaw: It included a significant amount.
Matt Regusci: Yes, it included a significant amount. But like the cost to Chipotle was over like 1.6 billion in the course of three days. And that was a lot.
Francine L Shaw: And that was 2015?
Matt Regusci: Yes.
Francine L Shaw: Right.
Matt Regusci: The cost of the spinach industry was the same. When there was the spinach outbreaks, it took over a decade or almost a decade, about a decade for the spinach industry as a whole to sell as much spinach as it did in 2006. So all of that operational value was gone as well.
Francine L Shaw: And I can assure you that there are people that still think about that because I do.
Matt Regusci: [00:23:00] Yes.
Francine L Shaw: Is that number few? Probably. Probably it's those of us that are familiar with it and work in the industry that, or were impacted that think about it still. But there are people that still think about it when they, spinach, raw spinach.
Matt Regusci: Yes. There was a couple like why parts in her article. The financial impact of this gap is significant. When food safety culture is reinforced primarily through rewards and corrections, rather than shared responsibility and clarity, it becomes transactional, right? So we just read that whole paragraph. "The financial impact of this gap is significant, even if it's rarely labeled. As such, companies pay for it. Inefficiencies, attrition, corrective actions, loss capacity, and leadership bound with consumed by damage control. These costs are diffused, which make them easy to overlook until they compound."
That is so true. As an executive, my whole entire [00:24:00] career as an executive, when things are perpetually going to hell because the systems just aren't good and the employees are leaving, that creates so much cultural stress on the executive team and they just become.
It becomes part of what your daily job is, so much so that you forget that there's a better way to do things. Like legit, you just, it just, you become a professional firefighter and you're like, okay, my job is just to fight fires as opposed to stopping, taking like a sabbatical. When I say sabbatical, I don't mean like a month long or a year long sabbatical, but taking a couple days as an executive team, looking at everything, really being open and honest about how things are going, looking at competitors and seeing what is it that they do that we do differently. Is that good? Is that bad? How does this [00:25:00] company do this? Looking at what I like to do is not just look at how competitors do things, but how do other companies in a similar industry that are very successful do things? I joke around with my team. It's called R&D equals rob and duplicate.
You don't have to create whole new things from scratch. You can go and find other companies that are doing something successful that you want fixed in your organization. Find what they're doing and repeat them within your organization. That takes time. That is not easy to do. It's way easier momentarily to fight fires, particularly if you get really good at it.
It's a lot more complicated to go and grab systems that work someplace else and tweak them into your organization and get everybody on board over the next [00:26:00] month or year to put those systems in place while you're still fighting the fires, right? Because not everything is a place, you still have to fight the fires, but then after a while, then you start reaping the rewards from that work.
Francine L Shaw: I think people tend to become very reactionary and get so deep in fighting that fire that they forget there's something outside of the fire and they just get so buried that they don't know what to do. You know what I mean? It, they did just don't know what to do. So instead of stepping back and saying, Hey, I need to fix this, they just continue to fight until they either get burned out and quit or they get fired.
Matt Regusci: Yes. And a lot of people get burned out and quit. So they're like, particularly if you are a food safety quality manager in an organization that doesn't care about food safety or quality, that is very painful. That is very painful, and I [00:27:00] see those churn fast.
You and I have seen it together with people who have called us that have moved to different places because literally they're being asked to do things that are illegal and they're like, no, I, I'm not going to do that.
The FDA is coming in a month. Let's fix all these things that let's falsify all these documents to make it look like we've been doing what we're supposed to be doing the last year when the FDA was here last time. Yeah, you and I are like really helpful trying to find solutions for people, and then they go, yeah, we have to get this done because my boss wants me to get all this stuff done before the FDA comes in here next week or a month from now, and this is their third visit and they're, they've coming here.
And I'm like, yeah, you gotta go.
Francine L Shaw: I'm all about creativity and creative solutions. I'm not about fraud.
Matt Regusci: Now.
Francine L Shaw: You're not gonna find any support from me when it comes to that. God [00:28:00] and the number of people that have asked me to do things like that just over the years is just insane, insane.
Matt Regusci: Insane.
Francine L Shaw: The amount of money that I have turned down.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: Is crazy.
Matt Regusci: And that's the, my daughter's in college and she wants to follow in my footsteps in business. Originally she wanted to be a doctor and then she was like, Actually, I think I wanna do business. Which is good 'cause it matches her personality. Yeah. Her future husband wants to be a doctor. And I was like, all right, that's perfect.
So one of you guys is gonna be a doctor. She's taking an ethics class right now. And so she was asking me, she, she was doing her homework and she was asking me about the premise of it was ethics and integrity in business, you could lose short-term gains for long-term reward. I said to her, that is absolutely 100% correct.
There are a lot of companies that in my business, and I'm not, [00:29:00] when I say a lot, a couple, few handfuls, but they will be certification printing shops. They will maybe send auditors that really don't care. They go and they find auditors that really don't care. They go do what I would consider a bad audit and very few.
Checks and balances and they just send it through. Right? But those companies tend to die, right? Right. 'cause what you're selling is integrity, right? When you're, what we sell is integrity. And in the long term, that is the most important thing, is integrity. Same with food. What you're selling is a product, right?
Consumers, when they consume that product, they assume they're not going to die or get sick, and they're going to be eating something that's nutritious in quality. Even candy, right? Candy, they're not assuming it's nutritious, but they do assume that the quality is gonna meet the certain expectation and that they're [00:30:00] not going to die when they eat the candy, right?
There are basic assumptions, and so when you ruin that trust. You ruin your integrity and when you ruin that integrity within the consumer base, you ruin your business.
Francine L Shaw: I've always said the one thing that nobody can take from you is integrity. You do that yourself.
Matt Regusci: Yes, that is true. That is true in today's age.
People can try to ruin your integrity because social media can, something could go viral and et cetera, et cetera, but it's really over the long term, what are the results? Not some fire that happens because somebody got the wrong package or whatever. But yeah, this was a very interesting article. Thank you.
Azure and Food Safety News, again, I really like what she writes.
Francine L Shaw: I do too.
Matt Regusci: Bye. On that note, don't eat [00:31:00] poop.