Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
In this episode, renowned food safety advocate and host of Trust Bites Dr. Darin Detwiler talks to Jeremy Zenlea, head of health and safety for EG America and a member of the My Trusted Source advisory board about the definition of 'trust' in food safety.
Jeremy Zenlea comes at the question from a retail perspective, bridging the gap between trust on the supply chain and consumer sides of the food industry.
This podcast is presented by My Trusted Source.
Produced by Joe Diaco Podcasting Support.
Jeremy Zenlea comes at the question from a retail perspective, bridging the gap between trust on the supply chain and consumer sides of the food industry.
This podcast is presented by My Trusted Source.
Produced by Joe Diaco Podcasting Support.
Creators & Guests
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 Many existing validation systems are outdated, bureaucratic, and expensive, creating inefficiency and allowing vital information to slip through the cracks.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: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Trust Bites. I'm your host, Dr. Darin Detwiler, and Trust Bites is brought to you by the fine people at My Trusted Source, your digital solution for a global food supply system. I am part of an advisory board, and I am so happy today to be joined by Jeremy Zenlea, another one of the advisory board members.
Welcome, Jeremy.
Jeremy: Hello, Darin. How are you?
Darin: Recently I was able to sit down with Jeremy and some other folks there at My Trusted Source and have some great conversation and be interrupted by robots in a restaurant.
Remember that?
That was amazing.
It was very weird to see, like, robots carrying dishes and stuff away from us, but--
Jeremy: Yeah. I don't know how we get used to something like that. That is, that was really interesting.
Darin: Well, I mean, you're only trusting them in terms of carrying dishes back and forth to the kitchen, but trust is an interesting issue. We're going to talk about trust, but before we talk about trust, I'd like you to, for those in the audience who might not know who you are, tell us a little bit about, about who exactly is Jeremy Zenlea.
Jeremy: Sure. Thank you. Happy to be on with you. So, again, Jeremy. I am the director and head of safety for EG America. EG america is a parent company to a lot of different convenience store brands. So we have, like, Cumberland Farms in the northeast. Quick Stop, Quick Shop out west. And several others.
So my background is in food science and, you know, I've come through retail. I've been in the retail field for about five or six years at this point. Before that, all food manufacturing. So it's, it's been a very interesting transition.
Darin: And you have a lot of other advisory or leadership capacities and things that you've done that, that really have just, it just goes to show to the diverse roles that you've played and how that all comes together in what you do. And I'm sure that this is part of, you know, the bigger picture in terms of why you are considered to be a trusted name in this sector.
But that's also a segue into the focus of this episode. Let's talk about trust. You know, trust is only five letters, but is such a complex concept.
Jeremy: It is.
Darin: How how do you define trust?
Jeremy: Trust as the concept itself, right? Is a unique relationship between someone and someone else or something and someone else or a brand and someone else. And really what it signifies is in the retail sense is that you can walk into any one of EG America's stores and trust that all you have to do to stay safe is be normal. Go in, buy your stuff, buy your food, whatever you want and leave. Nothing happens. You go on with your day. We are just a mere stop and afterthought that happened. You trust us. You trust that that's going to happen.
That's why you pick one of our stores as opposed to a lot of our competition, which is. We're a very diverse group, of course, in the convenience store world. However it is saturated. So there's a lot of convenience. And the way that we create that trust with our consumers and our customers is by doing a lot of different things that in the background to make sure that the environment as well as the product, as well as their experience is all centered around safety.
So again. That trust is a strong bond because we don't only serve the individual, we serve that individual's child, we serve that individual's grandparents, we serve that individual's anybody. And that's our goal, is to serve anybody and everybody.
So, the reason we want them to trust us is we want them to know that when they come into one of our stores, no matter who they bring in, what types, if they have allergens, they will be aware. If they have anything else, then all they have to do is buy a product and not have to have that fear of that they're actually taking any sort of risk while being in an art environment. And that to me is what trust is when you're talking between, again, a brand and their consumer.
Darin: There's something you said that that is sticking out for me, Jeremy, in that, you know, I might go into a convenience store and see one person there behind the counter. But I want to, in terms of trust, believe that there's actually a lot of people behind the scenes that are taking a variety of actions, even actions that I don't know about or haven't imagined, that are really there to help that element of trust.
Jeremy: Behind that clerk and behind every single item that is in that store offered for sale, we have, there's literally, in our case, thousands of people who've done a ton of legwork to make sure that what you are being offered is trustworthy. And it's trustworthy in the fact that it's safe, but it's not only safe. It's also what you're expecting to purchase. So, if I give you something and you say you want a chocolate bar, you have to trust us. That is going to be a real chocolate bar. Sounds kind of silly, but Darin, as you know, there's many cases where it's not a real chocolate bar in there and it could be a knockoff or it could be a fake.
Well, we do our due diligence and that's what I want our consumer to really understand, is behind that person are thousands of people making sure that every single thing that's on that shelf is going to be enjoyed by our consumer without any fear of any repercussions happening. Because that's what we do.
And that's how we've gained that trust. We have people coming in and out of our stores, especially in the Northeast in the Cumberland Farms, that have been coming in the same store for 40 years plus, and they've been living within five miles of that store for 40 years plus. So, they've come in with their parents, then they came in with their kids, now they've come in with their grandkids.
And that to me is a great example and demonstration of the trust that we are able to build and our goal is to build with every single person we have.
Darin: You know, I used to live across the street from a Cumberland Farms,
Jeremy: All right.
Darin: There was this one gentleman who was always there in the evenings, because that's usually when I popped in there.
It was at the end of the day to get some kind of snacks, or missing milk, or cheese, or something like that. And he always played the smoothest jazz. It was always cool, it's like, clearly, he's like, "I own this, I'm gonna play my jazz," you know, right?
But, without naming specific names, can you highlight, like, who are the jobs? Who are some of the kind of the people that are doing things behind the scenes? Obviously there's like the, the, the, the clerk or the attendant or whatever you call it. You know, the most customer facing kind of person that you would tend to see. But what are some of the other types of of people behind the scenes that are helping to build that trust?
Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. So we are fortunate in EG America that we have a health and safety field team. And the health and safety field team is just that. They're specialists that specialize in health and safety and that includes, again, food safety as well as occupational safety as well as environmental safety. Just to clarify, we give them a lot of specialized training. And what their job is, is to go visit each location and create a partnership with that location. So again, we're not a police officer ,criminal type of deal. It's a partnership and through that partnership, what they're doing is they are taking stock of all the food safety practices that are happening.
They're taking stock of how is the environment? Is the environment going to have something that's gonna contribute to a food safety incident or a safety incident otherwise? And they are going around constantly visiting locations and making sure that we are creating that trust factor.
Now, above all that is, there's leadership, right? The leadership is the folks that are creating that trust, that then trickles down to the rest of us. And leadership says that we want to make sure that safety is paramount. Safety is very paramount in an organization. Again, food safety and occupational safety and what that does is, that trickles down into how the category managers are purchasing.
Yes, they look at safety and yes, we're qualifying every single item that comes to store. The category managers are not the only people that are there. There's also a team that we have that just goes and they look at the sale of food, right? How does it look quality wise? Is it perfect? Is it laid out? Is it laid out so that the consumer can really see what it is? Are we giving the right information? So like, I was on a project not too long ago where we're redoing our website and we're weaving down the website so it's a lot more user friendly from the nutritional aspect because we can do these, like, made-to-order things. The website actually lets the consumer build things on the website and then get the nutritional information from that.
So, again, that's another project. Is that something we have to do there? No, because we already had the nutritional information available and we have it widely available, but it's one of those things that we want you to trust us or, like, okay, we're not going to hide it. Here's every single component you could use. Go for it. You could do what you need to do. But we have them. And then, of course, like with all the training and everything, what it really comes down to in the end is, just like a coach can't win a basketball game without an athlete, it's the store. It's the frontline employees that really bring the idea of trust to the consumer.
You know, just their interactions with consumers every day and then feeding the feedback to us. I know many managers out there that, you can't believe what an amazing store they have in terms of the quality of food that's in there, the safety of everything, the cleanliness and I'll even shout out to them in Agawam, Massachusetts, they're insanely incredible with that. And we use that, we go to them and we say, "Hey, what are you doing that everybody else isn't doing to create that trust factor?" They tell us. And that's what we fall.
And listen, that's what it's about. It's about accountability on our part. If we do something wrong, it's about making sure that we are communicating effectively with our consumers for whatever they need and that, in the background, we're doing more and exceeding anything, any regulations, anything that's out there, we are exceeding it to make sure that that product that they're purchasing, they can have a hundred percent trust in when they eat it so much so that they don't have to think about it.
They don't have to think, "Am I taking a risk eating the sandwich?" No, they don't have to think about it. So hopefully you give a little bit of peace of mind as well.
Darin: Well, speaking of risk, when we look at trust, let's, look at what can happen when we lose that trust or we're not able to build that trust. What happens in the retail sector when there is a breakdown in trust?
Jeremy: So, trust is an interesting thing. You could take a lifetime to build it and you could take about 10 seconds to break it. And then you'll have to have another lifetime to hopefully build it and gain it back. That essentially is what we have to deal with. Okay. And that, that's the risk. The risk is that, listen, when you go off and you're with your family, right, you're driving on a road trip, we were just talking about, you're taking a road trip, right? When you get off the highway, I mean, there is no more than six or seven could be in stores, gas stations, all readily available to go. They all kind of sell a lot of the same thing. They do a lot of the same thing. I mean, gas from one place is going to be gas from another place. The chocolate bar is going to be the same there as it is elsewhere.
And because of that, trust is something that we have to have, because the second it's broken, and I'll tell you how it's broken. Okay. The number one reason is broken is when you fail to communicate and listen to your consumer. Okay. When the consumer tells you that you have an issue, you need to take that very seriously and say, "Okay, let's take a look. Do we have that issue? Why is it breaking our trust? Why contribute to this? Can we do things differently? Can we do things more efficiently? Can we do things more pleasing?"
Right? Who knows, but that in the end, we have to make sure that we are doing that. We're also, when we're communicating, we're also showing that we have committed to accountability. Okay. We have a recall, which does happen, we put signage out there saying, Hey, we messed up or there's an issue. We don't openly blame our suppliers. Cause again, that's another trust link that we keep. We take the hit, of course, on us cause it's our brand and it's our job in the end to make sure that everybody's doing what they need to do to make things safe.
And we get out right in front of it and we tell the consumer, Hey, this X, Y, and Z happened, you know, come back to us. Please let us know if you have anything and we'll do that as part of the recall process. But even more so, we take accountability for it. So if someone calls us and through one of our consumer hotlines and says, "Hey, you know, this made me sick," we're not just going to bark at it and be like, "There's no way, there's no way it made you sick, this person's lying." We approach it from the other side. We approach it from, okay, there is something. We need to investigate every single issue that comes. And that's how we build trust, because we're investing everything. We understand what the consumer needs and we are regularly communicating with them and taking accountability.
Darin: Well, Jeremy Zenlea, thank you very much. I trust that we'll be talking some more about these and related topics. And again, thank you for joining us on this episode of Trust Bites, produced and presented by My Trusted Source.
Jeremy: Excellent. Wonderful talking to you.
Darin: Thank you.