Trust Bites

Food safety: a daunting enough challenge for any restaurant or mom-and-pop, but how does the complexity of managing food safety scale to very large organizations? This week's returning guest, Jeremy Zenlea, is here to talk about just that.

Zenlea is Director and Head of Health and Safety for EG America, a parent company to several popular gas station and convenience store brands, and he speaks to the complexities inherent to an industry that offers a wide range of products to a diverse, regionally diffuse population. He discusses bottom-up demand for food safety culture, the importance of building relationships with suppliers and how his industry navigates regional preferences while maintaining consistency. He emphasizes that a strong food safety culture is key to maintaining customer trust.
  • (00:18) - Introduction and Guest Background
  • (02:38) - The Complexity of Convenience Store Offerings
  • (07:11) - Challenges of Building a Food Safety Culture
  • (10:59) - Trust Building in the Supply Chain
  • (17:20) - Regional Differences in Convenience Stores
  • (20:45) - The Importance of a Diverse Food Safety Culture

This podcast is presented by My Trusted Source.
Produced by Joe Diaco Podcasting Support.    

Creators & Guests

Host
Dr. Darin Detwiler
Dr. Darin Detwiler is a nationally recognized leader in food regulatory industry and academia, with over 25 years of consultation for industry, government, and NGOs.
Guest
Jeremy Zenlea
Director, Head of Health and Safety at EG America

What is Trust Bites?

Hosted by food safety industry leader and consumer advocate Dr. Darin Detwiler, "Trust Bites" examines the challenges of ensuring food safety in a complex global marketplace and maintaining brand reputation.

With the rise of global food trade, consumers, retailers, and producers alike are increasingly concerned about the safety and quality of the food they buy. Many existing validation systems are outdated, bureaucratic, and expensive, creating inefficiency and allowing vital information to slip through the cracks.

"Trust Bites" delves into the validation process, discussing the challenges and limitations of current systems and exploring fair and equitable solutions.

Darin: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Trust Bites. I'm your host, Dr. Darin Detwiler. This and all our episodes of Trust Bites are presented by the fine folks at My Trusted Source, your digital solution resource for our ever-complicated global supply system.

Here today with Jeremy Zenlea, another advisory board member with My Trusted Source. Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy: Hello. Hey, how are you doing?

Darin: Great. Do me a favor, if you will, for those who have no idea who you are, will you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. So again, my name is Jeremy and I am the Director and Head of Health and Safety for EG America. EG America is the parent company of a lot of popular gas station/convenience store brands across the country. And we're at about 1,600 locations at this point. We sell any and everything and, again, happy to be here and happy to discuss with you.

Darin: Well, it's a pleasure to be talking with you. I think I told you this a while back. I remember from when I was a kid, a long time ago, that sense of freedom when I was given a dollar or two, again, a long time ago by my parents and allowed to walk a block and a half or so away to the convenience store near where I grew up.

It was this wondrous place. You walk in, it's got candy bars and it had, well, it also had alcohol and cigarettes, but that's, you know, it was a thing back then. But there was ice cream and there was milk and there were video games back when video games were new. And I used to play Centipede and Pac Man and there was crackers. Even back then, back in the '70s, I remember this as being this place where you could find everything in there.

Jeremy: Oh yeah.

Darin: In your perspective, with convenience stores as a retail location that you can find everywhere--in some places, it's literally the difference between a food desert and having places where people could buy foods --just how diverse is this world of convenience stores?

Jeremy: Yeah. I'll agree with you, Darin. I remember that when you woke up, when you walked into a convenience store and you had, again, in my day, it was more like five bucks in your pocket, but, and uh, is like opening up the gates of Eden, it's wonderful.

So, totally get that. And I still kind of get that feeling a little bit walking in, just because there are so many possibilities. Again, I love that there's so many possibilities, but the other half of me gets a little bit nervous that there's so many possibilities because there is complexity in our range.

Unlike a lot of the other industries, what convenience stores do differently is we don't specialize in one thing. We specialize in, like, everything. So we can go from, as discussed, a bag of chips, bag of Doritos, all the way to some of our more coastal locations that sell live bait and we have to deal with where the live bait is and so on and so forth.

We also have restaurant style, could be in stores. Fried chicken, especially in the south. They fry gizzard. They fry gator. And I've got to tell you, it is delicious. My first time trying a fried gizzard was actually at one of our locations in the panhandle of Florida. And again, maybe not something I'll get again, but it's very good to have.

And so we literally deal with everything. And we also do deli slicing. We slice fresh meat in the back at a lot of our locations. So if you name it, we do it or we've tried it.

Darin: Okay. Let's just, for the sake of discussion here, let's do some kind of ballpark numbers. In a typical convenience store that you take a look at, that you are involved in, about how many different types of products might one find?

Jeremy: Oh, it's probably like--

Darin: Five thousand?

Jeremy: Yeah, it could be. I mean, it also depends. It's not just what we sell at the location that's different, it's how the location looks and the environment, which significantly changes as you go through generations of stores, as you go from like. the Northeast where we have zero land, right? So we have tiny little stores, all the way to in the middle of Nebraska, where we have these massive stores that almost double as grocery stores. We even have a couple of liquor stores actually sprinkled out there somewhere, which is interesting.

So yeah, we have all different locations and types and what ends up happening is that, regionally, you learn what the consumer wants within that region and they stock it. But we have to also make sure that we're tracking some of those regional products to make sure, again, we're keeping the trust up and staying safe. And it is a lot of products.

So we have two different lines. We have the, you know, Frito Lay branded stuff. And then we have all of our private label stuff that we do, too. That's a whole other side of the health and safety team that manages that piece of it. And just in that, just to give an example of what we have branded, we have things, everything from a special hot dog, right? That's on the roller grill, to our own lighters, like, you know, lighter, light a cigarette type of thing. So our health and safety folks have to not only understand and learn about the safety restrictions and all the intricacies of a hot dog, now we actually also have to learn about the safety intricacies and everything about lighters.

So we deal with a lot, which actually is one of the best parts of our position, we feel, is that we really get to understand and get into a lot of different areas of safety that we normally wouldn't be exposed to when you're working in food manufacturing or in some of the other industries involved.

Darin: Bringing up safety, we can look at food in different areas, right? We can look at quality. Does the packaging look good? We don't want to have dented or damaged boxes or things that are miscolored or whatever, right? That bag of chips or that candy bar that's been in the sun and the packaging is faded, right? That doesn't necessarily impact food safety, but it affects the quality somehow. Food safety, and we'll get back to that, there's food defense and food security, when you start looking at the idea of impact on, can someone economically sabotage, you know, bioterrorism or are we looking at something where it's impacting sustainability issues?

And then there's authenticity. If it's a branded hot dog, it doesn't matter if it's in Nebraska or New Jersey or Florida, they want it to taste that way. If it's a branded tortilla chip or candy bar or I remember the slushies, the Slush Puppies drinks. You know, you want the grape flavor. You don't want the grape flavor to change or be different from location to location. So you want to have not only the quality and the consistency, but, if it is Nathan's Hot Dog or whatever the Slush Puppy brand is, you know, I could see it, but I don't know what the name of it is, I want that authentic look and experience and taste, and I want it to be not a knockoff.

Jeremy: Right.

Darin: I don't want, "It's Sloosh Puppies,"

Jeremy: "Slosh Puppy." That sounds

Darin: It's gotta be slush, not sloosh.

Jeremy: You have to pay extra for the sloosh. That's the problem.

Darin: There you go. That must create some challenges in terms of a food safety culture.

So the question is, how do we build and implement a food safety culture that encompasses all of this?

Jeremy: How much time do you have, Darin? We have an interesting way of building a food safety culture in EG America. We do it a little differently only because of how we understand where our stores are at. So the big challenge that we have, at least for us, and probably really among a lot, any major retailer out there is that is it's largely decentralized.

So we have one corporate office in Westboro, Massachusetts. And then we have 1,700 stores scattered across America, right? So because of that, we have to make sure that the culture is not really driven 100% only by those that are sitting in HQ, but is driven locally within each brand and each store.

The way that that is difficult is that the prevailing thing is that you start at the top and make sure that they understand the culture. The culture does really start at the top and we here at EG America are very lucky to have a culture and a leadership supporting that is very invested in safety and believes in food safety and the paramountness of food safety and workplace safety. And not really financially, but more so because we want to keep everybody safe and we wanna make sure that you come to work for us and then you go home and nothing happened and it's just a normal day for you.

Same for our consumers. So where we started was we said, "Okay, the leadership team, great, we need food safety culture, we need this and that. This is what you're gonna do." We expect that food safety is intertwined into all the decisions we make. This is great. This is all good stuff, Darin, but when that said in Westboro, we have to make sure that that message is passed over to our store in California, and how do we do that?

We've actually created a little bit of a different strategy where we're creating the demand for food safety culture from the ground up. Instead of having it just start from the top and only come from the top, it's now going to be coming from the employees as well. So it's coming from all different levels.

So how this scenario would play out, and how it has played out, and we have a lot of really good examples of this, is leadership has a training. We do training. I have a field team of specialists out there doing these trainings. They do a training on heat and serve, right?

You have to heat something up to 165, okay? Because maybe they're serving chicken wings or whatever. Great. Now we want the store employee to really take that information and say, "Okay, I have to heat this up to 165. That should mean that anything else that's poultry, I probably should have to heat up to 165 too."

What our expectation is and what we're trying to do is we want the employee to be able to generate that question in their mind and then ask that question to their leadership because the more questions like that, the more things that are being brought up, that is creating the demand for a food safe culture.

The way we're doing this is we have 20,000 employees, okay? Our turnover rate is very high, just like in any retail. So out of ten employees that are there one year, maybe one out of those ten employees are still there the next year. So we have an issue. We have to keep changing and going with that turnover.

And the way, again, we do that is we're creating the localized demand, and we call it a bottom-up demand for our food safety culture.

Darin: But there's also a food safety culture that goes on behind the scenes I'm imagining, in terms of, you talked before about, you know, whether it's sandwiches or ready to eat foods. What are you doing as a corporate in terms of verifying that, if it says 100% beef or it says it's organic or whatever, whatever the certification is literally on the label, what are you doing behind the scenes in terms of building that trust in terms of food safety before it even gets to the store?

Jeremy: So, there's a massive process behind the scenes. Before they have a new product come out, we take part in every single piece of it. We regularly visit our vendors to make sure what they say they're doing, they're actually doing. That's the first thing. Again, you're establishing trust, which, as we discussed in the last episode, trust can take years to build and seconds to break.

So we're building that trust, especially if it's a new supplier. Like with a new supplier, we'll go out to their facility. We'll take a look, see what they do. When they give us the product and they say, "Okay, we're going to give you this. We'll give you a candy bar and this candy bar is lower sugar and it's organic." Well, we're not going to take any claims at face value.

What we do is we work with that supplier and we say, "Okay, I need to have a validation for each one of the claims on your packaging again." If they can't produce that validation and they're just giving you these claims, Darin, that is your red flag that you do not want to work that supplier anymore, right?

Because that trust is already broken. They're saying it's organic, but they have no way of telling you why it's organic? That trust is broken. We know that because we've been in the business long enough to understand how these relationships are formed.

What we do with really great suppliers is it's an ongoing relationship and partnership. I'm regularly on the phone with our suppliers saying, "Hey, we have these issues." And we talk through it together. They're not going to hide it from us. They know we're better to talk through it.

We're creating trust if they're going to change the ingredient and that ingredient change is going to hurt our current packaging and we could have hundreds of thousands of pre-made packages ready to go for the stuff to be packed into, where our trust factor comes in is if they change that ingredient.

They need to tell us, number one, and they also need to have us approve that ingredient to make sure it's not something that is going to significantly alter the flavor, the taste, any of the organoleptic profiles of it, but also the safety. And we also look a little deeper and we say, "Okay now do you have that included in your food safety plan?" or if you're in a USDA plan, it's a meat product for your HACCP plan so on and so forth.

So we look and we validate every piece of that product that is out there, especially when there are claims on that product. And again, a lot of that back and forth is really how we're forming that trust with our supplier and our strong suppliers. They will be the first we go out to with new products. We'll say, "Hey, we've had a great relationship. Yes, we've had some bumps in the road. We've worked through it together. You've done good on your part. We've done what we need to do on our due diligence. We have a new product. We'd like you to do it." As opposed to a supplier that is constantly hiding stuff from us or not really getting back to us.

If we have quality issues or safety issues and so on and so forth, we have suppliers, Darin, all the time that we say, "Hey, we'd like to come for a plant visit."

They said, "No, you're not coming for a plant visit. We're not allowing you to come for a plant visit."

Say, "Okay, that's fine. We're onto the next supplier."

It happens. So that's how we look at creating trust through the supply chain. And again, part of culture is empowerment, right? And communication and making sure that those things are happening so that we can make sure that we're empowering our frontline employees, the person heating up the tornado or heating up the sausage or heating up the pizza, all they have to do is heat up the pizza and do what the settings are because the background has been done.

We know by the time it got to the store, it's safe.

Darin: I know we talk about food safety, but even with an allergen, if it says that it is free of, you know, lately you're talking about that pizza, right? Imagine someone who's like, "I'm hungry, I want to eat that pizza. I just want to make sure it's free of any nut allergens." And the packaging says it's free of nut allergens and the person preparing it, selling it or whatever goes, "Yeah, based on this, it says it has no nut allergens." But behind the scenes, having that confidence that it was validated.

I was working with a restaurant years back that found out that one of their supplied items that was supposed to be nut free was produced in a facility that one day a year they did produce something that had peanuts in it and they said, "No, we're not going to get it for you because you can't guarantee that it is produced in a 100% nut allergen free facility." It was just one day. But you can't, anything more than zero means that it can't be 100%. We can't guarantee this to our customers.

Jeremy: Yeah. I see that all the time. I've been places where the notion of being, like, nut free or even gluten free is, they're talking about one line that there's no nuts on, but guess what? Three feet over is the other line that makes all the stuff with the nuts in it.

Darin: The vegan hamburger being cooked on the same grill, grill, griddle, or whatever, as the traditional hamburger,

Jeremy: There you are.

Darin: That kind of defeats the purpose.

Jeremy: Yeah. And it happens all the time. It happens all the time. Especially when you're talking about FDA -inspected facilities, they haven't seen the FDA in years, so they're just going to continue to do what they do. And I'm not going to blame them because maybe it's not knowing what they don't know. And again, a lot of these, especially when you go to more of a mom and pop type of manufacturing supplier, you'll see that their idea, and this is something as an industry we have to fix, but their idea of a safe product and them being safe is that they have not had any recalls, and that's the only idea of why they're safe, because they have yet to have a recall.

Darin: No one's ever said anything, so we must be okay.

Jeremy: Yeah. Or they have, I show up and we have all these lists of issues. They're like, "Oh no, we're fine. We're fine."

"Okay. Show me your last audit."

They show me an FDA audit from five years ago. I'm like, "Guys, what am I supposed to do with that?"

But that is their idea. That is a huge risk right there.

Darin: You talked earlier about how, you get off the highway and there's a bunch of convenience stores/gas stations, and, you know, people on a road trip or whatever. One last question is: I would assume that when you're talking about a food safety culture, you're also thinking about it in terms of, it's not just convenience per se, it's convenience for people that literally may be in a different county or a different state within the hour.

Jeremy: Absolutely. We get all walks of life in our stores, okay? And we love all walks of life in our stores. We do. Okay. But when you have a place like a restaurant, like, say you take the Capitol grill, which is a really fancy high-end steak, you're going to get one sort of demographic, mostly, that is going to be your consumer at that restaurant.

Convenience store? Nope. We have everybody. And we have people from all over the world coming to convenience stores because, again, it's a place to stop. If you talk about, like, regionality of even flavors and tastes, I, before having a this position, never understood how different it is. It's almost like you might as well be at a different country.

When you go to the South, for example, I remember when we first launched our coffee down there, I was down in our Tom Thumb stores. And they were saying, "What do people think of the coffee? Do they like it?" Coffee's huge up here. Cumberland Farms and coffee is the product, as I'm sure you can recall, living across from one.

And a guy says, "Nope, we don't sell any of it."

I'm like, "Really?"

" Yeah, nope. No one likes it."

I'm like, "What do you mean they don't like it?"

"They won't try it."

Okay. Why won't they try it?

He said "They go, they basically take a little sample from each single one and if it's not dark enough," because I guess they really go by color, "they're not going to have it."

Well, we only had one dark. We had a Colombian dark at the time. We have more now down there.

But again, that's a seller. That's not a huge seller up here, but down there, it's huge. I remember during the pandemic, I had half the country calling me because they're freaking out because the local authorities were shutting down our self-serve coffee. The other half of the country is yelling at me or calling me all upset because they're shutting down the fountain. They don't care about coffee.

It's totally different. It's totally different. The regionality is, it's just crazy. But what we like to do though, is have that consistency where you can buy one of our main products, donut, here and have the same donut in West Virginia that you're going to have in New Mexico.

It's interesting, Darin. It's wild out there. But it works. So people come to us.

Darin: I have to admit, I travel a great deal in what I do, and I've been to some of those places where it is a convenience store/art gallery or convenience store/museum or convenience store/icon on the highway from Point A to Point B and it's almost as if sometimes the, the foods are second billing to the, you know, whatever it is, the, the--

Jeremy: Hey, nostalgia is a big piece of it. Again, we're talking about that trust. It goes right into that idea of nostalgia, right? We have people that come into our stores and they're like, " I live in California now and I haven't been to a Cumberland Farms in 30 years. I just had to stop in to get a coffee just because I needed to see the Cumberland Farms and see what it was like." We get that all the time.

Darin: I would imagine that the last thing they come in to find, though, is a complete breakdown or nonexistence of the food safety culture that--

Jeremy: If that's what they found there, then I would not be sitting here talking to you today from this chair. Let's put it that way.

Darin: Well, thank you for talking with me on this topic today. And again, it's easy to say, you know, one size fits all, or, it's out of the package, or, it's a canned product, but it sounds as if, wherever you go a food safety culture is going to have to evolve with a different regional sense or taste or fitting the needs of that specific location. And for a central view of it, it's got to be diverse in many aspects.

Jeremy: Food safety culture is one of those terms that is easy to say, but hard to do. It's just like regionality in terms of organoleptic preference. You also have training needs and education needs that are different in all areas of the country. As you know yourself as an educator, you can't educate people the same way that live in Maine, they're not going to consume the same way as someone in Texas. It just is different. And we've found that, right? So we have to scale all of our safety training and everything to make sure that we do speak to those folks because, guess what is a huge detriment to our culture is if no one can understand each other.

Darin: Very, very good point.

Well, Jeremy, thank you very much. And thank you for those who are watching this episode of Trust Bites, presented by My Trusted Source.

Jeremy: Thank you so much, Darin. Have a good day.

Darin: Thank you.