Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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!
DEP E186
===
Matt: [00:00:00] Where I see food safety people fail is that they're right.
They know they're right. They're going to tell everybody what the right thing is, and they think everybody is just going to get it. And that is not the case.
Francine: It's my way or the highway.
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 Regusci for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule.
Don't eat poop. Don't Eat Poop.
Matt: Hello, hello, Francine. You know what's interesting is Francine and I have talked to a lot of people that have started podcasts before after we had started a podcast, and they'd be like, "Well, [00:01:00] I'm still trying to really nail down my format before I start." And we always just laugh, and we're like, "Oh, man, it took us about, I don't know, 30 podcasts before you and I had pretty consistent starting and ending."
Francine: And we still don't have anything really nailed down.
Matt: No. No. Everybody's got a different style than... Yeah, so you do you. But it is funny, like our beginning, like me saying, "Hello, hello, Francine," and our ending of, "Don't eat poop. Remember, don't eat poop," that's been probably... We've done that for like 160 episodes.
Francine: 186. Oh, wow- Yeah, but I don't know- ... no, we didn't have it in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, we might- You're
Matt: right ... not have had it in the beginning. Go back and listen to some of the old ones that we... I try to forget about them.
Francine: I don't... Yeah. Well, I should go back and li- Oh my God, I don't know. They're probably... I don't know if I want to.
I wonder how different they are.
Matt: Yeah, they're pretty different.
Francine: Are they?
Matt: [00:02:00] We started off trying to do like two segments in one episode. Remember? We would have... I think they were good. I th- in the beginning, a lot of them were way more funny than-
Francine: We're not funny anymore?
Matt: We're still funny, but we tried to make things funny.
Francine: We always did that ending where we pulled something off like TikTok or got a, a short piece where we... What was that guy's name? There was that one guy that was cooking like the food in the airport restrooms, and he was just so... Some of the things were so crazy that he was doing. I can't remember what he was called.
He has a thing on TikTok. We talked about those at the end a lot, and we would find the pink stuff. Yes. Like the pink sauce or whatever it was.
Matt: I wrote and interviewed like, I don't know, 14 times on that one pink sauce story. That was back when- Yeah ... you and I were still writing.
Francine: Yeah, I, I miss writing. I [00:03:00] haven't written for a long time.
Matt: Yeah, we- I
Francine: miss writing ... gotta get
Matt: back into that. Oh, gosh, so much has changed over the last three years. All right. But today, Francine really had a great idea. I'm excited about this. Lead us off, Francine.
Francine: So I think that we should talk about training versus behaviors versus leadership versus culture, and like-
Matt: Oh, I thought we were gonna talk about more conspiracies after last show.
We're not talking about cons-
Francine: What kind of conspiracies would you like to talk about? Do we have conspiracies?
Matt: Our show's evolved over the years. Maybe we could just evolve into a conspiracy show. No, no, I like your topic better.
Francine: We'd probably have a whole new audience.
Matt: A whole new audience. Okay.
Francine: Conspiracy-
Matt: So say that again
and food
Francine: safety.
Matt: We're talking about what versus what versus what versus what?
Francine: Training versus behaviors versus leadership versus culture versus conspiracies. I mean, I'm adaptable.
Matt: So no, we're not going to add the fifth thing of conspiracies, but if you are interested in that, [00:04:00] then go back and listen to our episode last week where we talked about first time in three years, a potential conspiracy.
All right. So you had an intro to this too, that I forgot.
Francine: Yeah, I did. I did.
Matt: For context.
Francine: I did. Everybody knows the rules, so why do we keep screwing this up? That's the question.
Matt: I know. I r- if I remembered, it was a fantastic intro. That is right. Say that again.
Francine: Everybody knows the rules, so why do we keep screwing this up?
Matt: Training versus behavior versus leadership versus culture.
Francine: That's right. We have faith that everybody knows the rules. They know what to do, but they keep screwing it up, and this past summer is clear evidence that it keeps getting screwed up at one level or another. We keep messing it up. [00:05:00] Is it training?
Is it behavior? Is it culture? Or is it leadership? What do you think?
Matt: I think it's a combo of all three. Or sorry, all four.
Francine: We're just gonna blame everybody.
Matt: We talked about how our brains work. I have a hard time looking at one particular event or one particular variable without looking at all the variables combined.
Francine: What you're really saying, Matt, is you have a hard time making a decision.
Matt: No, I am very good at being decisive. Let's just say this. The majority of the decisions I make are correct because- Now, I mess up, and I'm perfectly fine saying when I mess up, and I will then figure out why I messed up. What variables did I not see?
But the reason why, as a leader, the majority of the decisions that I make are the correct decisions for that time is because I'm looking at all the variables that I can, taking out [00:06:00] certain variables that don't fit, and focusing on the variables that make sense within that decision-making process. So when I say the time, there could have been a better decision that I could see into the future, but we don't have the resources, we don't have the time, we don't have the processes, we don't have these things for this particular moment in time.
So the decision I make now will be different than the decision I make three years from now, and would've been d- different than decisions I made three years ago based upon the variables that I have in front of me right now. So when I look at the outbreaks of the cyclospora outbreak, I don't see it as just a training issue, or a behavior issue, or a leadership issue, or a culture issue.
I look at all of them combined.
Francine: What got us here?
Matt: The cyclospora outbreak in particular? I think that the culture, if we're looking at specifically Taylor Farms, and I don't know all [00:07:00] the variables that went into this because I don't work for Taylor Farms. But when I look at this, I go, "Okay, I think the culture of Taylor Farms is really good."
I think Taylor Farms' food safety culture is good. Could it be better? Yes. All food safety cultures can be better, but food safety culture is pretty good When I look at the leadership, I go, "Okay, I know a lot of the leaders either by name..." I mean, I know them by name, but either by personally or through other people.
The leadership of Taylor Farms, at least in the States, is very good. It's very good. They do believe in food safety culture. But what behaviors were broken down, and what is the food safety culture in Taylor Farms de Mexico? I don't know. And so could there be a culture break and a leadership break [00:08:00] that broke the behaviors and the training down there?
That is where I would be looking into it and be going, "What happened?" And okay, even with the good culture and good leadership and the appropriate behaviors and the right training, what was missed situationally, and why and how? Okay? Now, do I believe that they managed this outbreak correctly? No. So then I would look at that and go, "How would I manage this differently if I was them?"
I would have taken control over this and taken responsibility Day one. And then really try to own this and try to own the solution of fixing this right off the bat. Where right now it's all ambiguity, and that is partially the government's fault, a big portion of it. But if I was Taylor [00:09:00] Farms, I would've been helping them figure this out way faster for the victims' sake, because right now it looks like a conspiracy.
And where is that-
Francine: There's that word again ...
Matt: I know, because it's so true. But when we're looking at this with them in particular, I do think they have a good culture. I do think they have good leadership, at least in the States. I don't know what's going on in Mexico. But situationally something broke, and so then I'd be trying to figure out why, how, and m- how do we make sure this doesn't happen again?
'Cause this happened in 2023, so what situations happened again that repeated this, and why did we allow this to happen? If they were testing for this, they should've found it. So I- my assumption is they weren't testing this. So I'd be looking at my provider, which they probably are, my testing provider, my partner in this, and being like, "What's going on?
Can you not test for this? Was there an [00:10:00] invoice or a proposal for us to test for this and we just didn't do it? Who made that decision? Where was that breakdown there?" Because that is a cultural breakdown right there. All four of these things happen at the same time. You don't know what to train if you don't have the right culture and the right leadership to be looking at, and what are the risks?
Where could we be implicated? How would we hurt people? Blah blah blah blah. And then making sure to train that if this situation arises again, where let's say that there was flooding, 'cause it was really rainy down there. Let's say it was flooding and it did flood the fields, and cyclospora ended up on the fields.
What did we not do to catch this ahead of time? And then I'd be training to make sure we don't do this again five years or three years or whatever when there's another raining season or something.
Francine: So the parent company is in the States, correct? And this happened, the product came from [00:11:00] Mexico. If the parent company is in Mexico, and I agree leadership issue may have...
Or I'm sorry, parent company's in the United States, and I believe that leadership, I agree that leadership in Mexico ultimately out of the bag, but leadership from the parent company would be responsible for leadership in Mexico ultimately
Matt: Correct. 100%, that is correct. But as you and I both know, one restaurant is managed differently than another restaurant, even when it's not franchised.
Let's say it's all corporate entities, or even like a franchise. A franchisee could own 100 different-
Francine: Of corp- we talk corporate. It doesn't matter. It's all the same. Whoever the parent company is, whether we talk Yum Brand or corporate whatever, and I'm just throwing a brand out there, the parent is responsible for that restaurant.
Right. If [00:12:00] they're, let's say, outbreak.
Matt: Yes.
Francine: If they weren't in there, they're still res- Taco Bell was part of this Let's use them. Well, and I- I don't know who the, if it was- And
Matt: it would be a franchisee. It would be a franchisee that... Well, no, it would be a corporate decision to choose who the supplier is for Taco Bell, and so Taco Bell owns that corporately because it was their supplier that did this.
So corporately, Taco Bell did the right thing when they just owned it and fixed it. You're right.
Francine: And we're not hearing local restaurant names. We're hearing Taco Bell.
Matt: You are so good at leading these conversations, Francine. I see exactly where you're going with this. Well played. Well played. The audience sees it as well.
That was very well played. Okay, I agree with you because, okay, if this had been a [00:13:00] norovirus outbreak, you could say it was the individual manager at that individual Taco Bell underneath that franchisee. Let's
Francine: talk about Chipotle-
Matt: Okay, so- ...
Francine: in 2015. Yeah.
Matt: Yes.
Francine: We weren't hearing the individual restaurant names in Boston.
I wrote probably 20 articles about this. Well, we did, but Chipotle corporate took the hit for that, and they ran a multimillion-dollar campaign to get through all these outbreaks in 2015.
Matt: You led me right into that. True. 100% true. 100% true. Okay, so let's make some assumptions, and then we can break these assumptions and make other assumptions, okay?
Francine: I'm not saying they were individually responsible for each of those units and what happened in that particular unit or that particular unit's training. Ultimately, they are responsible for what happens for the cultures that are created in [00:14:00] those facilities, the leadership, the training, and the behaviors.
They're accountable.
Matt: 100%. Okay, but for the audience's sake, because this is actually, this is not the conversation I thought we were gonna go into. Oh, you did this very well. Okay, now we get to make scenarios, okay? 'Cause this- I think this is gonna be fun for the audience because they can see how this could work within their own entities corporately and individually, how it goes down.
At the end of the day, you in corporate know that whatever happens to your brand affects your brand. So having a good food safety culture corporately protects your brand, okay? It also protects consumers. It protects everybody involved. But at the end of the day, it protects your brand. So using the example between Chipotle and Taco Bell was a fantastic example of one that took completely, dropped the ball multiple times and one that took the ball and ran with it [00:15:00] to a touchdown.
So that totally agree with you. Okay, but individually, let's say... Okay, let's say the corporate culture is Good. They want to do what is right, but there is a breakdown because each individual region, each individual facility, or each individual restaurant or grocery store or whatever is managed individually.
So how do you then make sure the culture corporately gets to the region or the facility through the leadership of that individual facility to make sure the behaviors in that facility are matching corporate's behaviors and the training are matching that? I get how you're- Th-
Francine: they all want to do what is right.
They all think they are doing what is right, and that's where we have a problem, and there's a serious breakdown. There are a couple that do an excellent job at making this happen.
Matt: Yes.
Francine: There are a [00:16:00] lot that think they're doing a good job, but they're dropping the ball, which again, everybody knows the rules, so why do we keep screwing this up?
Matt: Yes. And corporate manages the communication to consumers, to federal entities, to state entities, to their suppliers, to their customers, et cetera, et cetera. So if corporate drops the ball on a crisis management, it affects the whole entire entity and everything in the chain as well. And I, so with that, I would agree with your assumption, although you haven't said it, the culture wasn't that great that, on the
Francine: supplier end.
Did Taco Bell or Chipotle say, "Hey, these restaurants weren't doing their job. I don't know what happened." "They weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing. I di- we just, we're not responsible for this. We don't know."
Matt: No, but Taco Bell wouldn't because it was a supplier issue, and so Taco Bell owns that supplier, where Chipotle was both the supplier issue [00:17:00] and a store-level issue, 'cause they had multiple norovirus outbreaks and a supplier issue simultaneously.
Francine: One right after another, but yes.
Matt: One right after another in successant events. It was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Francine: It was a bad year for them.
Matt: It was a bad year.
Francine: And you're right. Taco Bell, it was a supplier issue. However, consumers don't necessarily recognize that.
Matt: No, you're 100%. They don't recognize that.
They just see whoops.
Francine: The only consumers that recognize that are people that work in our industry. They just, consumers don't recognize that. So the only way to correct this is to address leadership and help them understand what culture truly is, and you have to change the behaviors To fix the training
Matt: I would go one step further.
You have to hire to the right behaviors. If you're gonna create a food safety culture, and you have people who [00:18:00] are very high up, say in a region that are like the CEO of Mexico, and the COO and the CFO and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're a company in the United States, you have an entity in a different region, and that entity, the leadership at the top are just placating to whatever the food safety culture is, but not actually implementing it fully, you may have to cut those people.
You may have to make a statement and cut those people. And where I'm making this is if you have not- If anybody listening to this has not read the book, The Habit, it is a fantastic book. There's a whole story about Alcoa changing their culture to safety, and how changing that safety culture. Now, this is not food safety culture, this is just safety culture, because Alcoa is a, a aluminum company.
But they had a regional executive that was a star. He literally [00:19:00] was the most profitable entity in Alcoa, one of the biggest leaders. He was on the track to becoming the next CEO of all of Alcoa. Totally screwed up. They found out about this, that, that there was a coverup in a board meeting from a nun, I think, from the place that Alcoa was at.
I'm trying to remember this story. I haven't read this book in a while. The CEO finds out about it. Within a couple weeks, that guy's canned. That made a statement for all of Alcoa, all of their investors. Everybody realized it doesn't matter how big you are in the company, if you don't buy into our values, you're gone.
And I think in order to make food safety culture be fundamental in an organization, it would take one fire, one person getting canned that does not bought in and will not buy in, and they are just going to do everything they can not to do it. [00:20:00] You fire that person, everybody all of a sudden realizes, "I either have to buy in or find a different job."
Francine: So I know a company that the store was store of the year, their manager was manager of the year, and then they found out that they were fudging their documentation within the store, and they fired the entire management staff. That sent a message loud and clear. That was a great leadership move And they had, that company had a great culture.
Their culture was amazing at that time
Matt: The book, by the way, is called The Power of Habit, written by Charles Duhigg. And the story I'm talking about is the story of Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill, and they talk about keystone habits. If a keystone habit is food [00:21:00] safety culture, if that's one of your keystone habits, then you could totally change the whole entire organization if you really live within that world.
And that includes what you said, Francine, like that entity fired their whole entire management team If you are Listening to this podcast and you work in culture, you work in a corporate, and you're managing culture, and you see that there is an entity of y- uh, yours that just does not buy into this, they may just have to go, and then everybody else will just fall into place.
Francine: Well, and we were talking about before we started talking about firing people, there might be situations where you can also move them to a different position. If they're not fitting well in the position that they're in, there may be a legitimate reason for that. You might just wanna move them to another position.
Matt: Okay. True. [00:22:00] That is true, unless they have a lot of power and influence so far. So let's say that- let's just use the Taylor Farms example, okay? So I believe that in the US the management team is- believes in food safety culture. I think the way they handled this did not show that, but I know the people, they believe in it.
Let's say that this is a Mexico problem, okay? Let's say that there was an ability for them to test cyclospora, but the CEO, the CFO, the COO chose not to do it because it was gonna cost a significant amount of money. Then there's no way you could- No ... move those people to a different position-
Francine: No ...
Matt: because they just have too much power.
Francine: I 100% agree with that statement. However, I'm gonna venture to say that m- the majority of people that are listening to our podcast are not executives. While many of them are, a [00:23:00] lot of them aren't.
Matt: No. No, 100%. And they can't, but they have influence. So when it comes down to the end of the day, though, there are certain positions that you cannot move, and those need to go.
There are other positions that you're 100% correct, they're in a position at which they have a lot of influence, they're influencing people against the food safety culture. You can move them to a different place, and then because of their position they have influence, not because of them individually. You just put somebody else in that position, boom, that, that believes in the food safety culture, now that changes, and you move this person someplace else.
So there is positional and situational influence and power in an organization, and there are people that hold influence and power within an organization. If a person themselves are influential and powerful, regardless of what position you put them in and they do not buy in, they have to go. [00:24:00] If you can move them to a different position because their position holds that, and then that next person that has that position has that influence and power and they believe in it, well, now you've been able to transfer somebody out and move somebody in, then that's very different.
That's why I say to you it's complicated, Francine- So many of- ... 'cause there's so many different aspects of this
Francine: Many of them also own their own businesses. It's not gonna work there either
Matt: No, if the, if the person at the top, this is where leadership is when you talk about culture. If the person at the top puts on their website that they have a food safety culture, but they don't believe in a food safety culture, like literally don't believe in it, th- obviously they can't- you're not gonna get rid of them.
You just may have to move to a different company because it's just talk. It's just words. It's not real-
Francine: Right ...
Matt: belief and action.
Francine: Right. There's a lot of different dynamics that fall into this, so.
Matt: Yes. But Taco Bell really did handle that well.
Francine: They did, 100%. [00:25:00]
Matt: Yeah, particularly when you have the example of an entity that didn't handle it well.
Francine: I think I said at the time, I felt like that would be a case study on how to handle this whole... Just the whole thing's gonna be a case study on what to do, what not to do.
Matt: Yeah, you could literally put Chipotle and Taco Bell side by side on this. You should write that article, Francine.
Francine: I probably could do that.
Matt: You have a lot of time on your hands right now.
Francine: I wouldn't go there
Matt: All right, so this is interesting, an interesting conversation, and this will definitely go into our training.
Francine: Oh. Well, yeah, we could take pieces of this and put it into the-
Matt: Or just talk about it 100%. Yeah.
Francine: I think clips of it would be fun, but we're gonna talk about this while we're breaking it apart.
Matt: This is how
Francine: we work things out.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. On our strength finders, because strength finders only has, like, the top five when there's, like, I don't know, like 20 [00:26:00] different strengths or whatever, 25, 30. There's a lot of them. Yeah, there- It'd be interesting to see how they all rank down below, 'cause I wonder where competition is for me.
'Cause y- you and I both, competition, sports competition, no. You know what? I don't think I am... I wanna win But I don't want to play by everybody's rules, so I'm not competitive in that same way. I'm like, okay, if I can't win- See- ... in this way, how do I change the aspect of it so I can win in a completely different way?
Francine: See, it depends, because my brain works in multiple ways. So it all depends on what it is, whether or not I want to play by the rules. Because sometimes I don't like rules, and other times I don't want to break the rules because I don't like to get in trouble. So it depends on what it- I like to make the rules.
Matt: Yeah, I do too. I like to make the rules. Why I never worked in corporate America well is because I never played by everybody's rules. Yeah. I was a fantastic consultant in corporate [00:27:00] America.
Francine: Right. But
Matt: actually trying to climb the... I was like, "No, wait, hold on a second. You have to climb this ladder over a period of time, and do all this sucking up, and all this different type of stuff in order to get to where the position I want to be at?"
Yeah,
Francine: I'm not that person.
Matt: I'm not that person, so it didn't work.
Francine: Yeah, don't- I haven't worked in corporate America for so long. But I'm great with people that work in corporate America, or people that own their own companies- Yes ... and helping them, and absolutely amazing.
Matt: Yeah. Which has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
W- this is-
Francine: This is when our ADHD kicks in, and we go completely off topic.
Matt: You know what? For the food safety culture trainings that we are creating, this is a fantastic conversation about that, about sometimes you can't play by the rules to change a culture. Actually, you know what? Most of the time you can't play by the rules to change a culture.
Francine: There's [00:28:00] a lot of gray area. None of it's bla- in- especially in this industry, there's more gray than black and white, and we work within that gray area 90% of the time. I've been told many times I do a really good job of walking that line and not stepping over it. And that's because there is so much gray.
It's like you don't go over it, but you've got to get really good at knowing where that line is with a lot of things
Matt: Yeah. My brain is thinking right now. Okay, if I was working in a company, like an employee in a company, middle manager or an executive, and I wanted to change the culture, wanted to change our food to, like, a really good food safety culture, how would I go about it [00:29:00] in middle management or VP level?
Not like executive, executive like CE. How I would go about it is I would meet with a whole bunch of people that had influence that thought like I did, or a whole bunch of people that had influence that I knew I could get to think the way I did. I would bring them aside, find ways to get them one-on-one. I would think about my conversations to strategically make it in a way that I got them to make their own decision that they wanted to do food safety culture.
Francine: You're manipulating people.
Matt: You saw me thinking, and that's exactly what I wanted to say, was like, it's a form of manipulation, but I didn't want to say the word manipulation- So- ... because that's a negative word, but it's exactly what it is. And this is why I said last episode, my daughter and my son-in-law were like, "It's a good thing that you're good because you could have totally used this for [00:30:00] evil."
But I think that way. How do I... Because I'm using it for good, manipulation to me is not negative. You can- manipulation can be, is a totally negative term, but if you're doing it for good, I guess the ends justify the means? So, see- That sounds like-
Francine: I agree with, like meeting with all of these individuals, talking to them, find out what's working, what's not working See how you can fit it into your overall plan.
Some of their ideas are going to be great. Some of them probably not so great. You have to get their buy-in. You have to get their buy-in. You absolutely have to get their buy-in. Those people whose ideas were great, those are the ones who you want to have on your team. Those are the people that you want to have on your team.
Matt: This is why I'm saying I'm trying to coach most of the people listening to this show are food safety people, okay? Where I see [00:31:00] food safety people fail in my career of over 20 years of working in food safety with the vast majority of the people being food safety people, okay? Where I see food safety people fail is that they're right.
They know they're right. They're going to tell everybody what the right thing is, and they think everybody is just going to get it. And that is not the case.
Francine: It's my way or the highway. They don't want to listen, many of them, to what other people say. And there's, I just wrote something about this. There's more than one way to get to the end result.
And it's not always important how you get there. What is important is that you get there. And as long as it fits within the parameters, it doesn't have to be your way.
Matt: Right. Right
Francine: It just doesn't. Just get there. [00:32:00] Don't get wrapped up in how it happens. Just get there. And where people go wrong is we have to do it this way.
It's always been this way. We have to do it this way. Let the people give input and let them do it in a way that might work for them that doesn't work for you because that's where you lose good people and that's where it falls apart.
Matt: 100%. 100%. And why I put it the way that I do, okay, so one of my strengths is individualistic. So I look at each individual person individually. Each individual person has their own goals. They have their own desires. They have their own hobbies. They have their own all these different things, okay? And I'm not, I am not going to talk about somebody's hobbies like I do the same thing.
That is so stupid. That is such a stupid sales technique, and I hate it, and I [00:33:00] see it every single time when somebody's like, "Oh, you have-
Francine: They're taught to do that. They're taught to do that. Yes, they
Matt: are taught to do that,
Francine: and
Matt: that is
Francine: manipulation and
Matt: that is-
Francine: And that
Matt: is so stupid because- It's so
Francine: easy to see
just don't ask me that stuff because you don't care. I don't want-
Matt: No. But when you put it into like, okay, if like let's say you're the VP of food safety, and you're trying to get the COO, the CFO, the CEO, et cetera, to buy into the culture, okay? Food safety culture. I would be phrasing it into, "Hey, I see we're having a bunch of these different problems with quality and it's stopping the line and all that different type of stuff.
How do you see us being able to fix this Overarchingly inside the facility so that we don't have all of these individual breaks. And so then you're changing it from an individual event that happens all the time that's slowing down the facility [00:34:00] to let's look at the forest so that we can figure out what trees need to be cut, what trees need to be fixed, et cetera, et cetera.
You're helping the COO look at the forest, which then is actually part of the food safety culture. So you would talk to the COO differently than you would talk to the CFO. So the CFO, you would say, "Hey, listen, we're trying to increase EBITDA, we're trying to increase revenue," all this different type of stuff.
"We're trying to look to scale. And so your job is to, how do we scale this profitably or so we don't need as much influx of cash to come through, which gets rid of equity and all this different type of stuff? How... A lot of this, what we're seeing here on the scalability process is food safety, and we're part of the P&L here," blah, blah, blah.
How do we look at this with food safety involved that can help with that whole entire process? And [00:35:00] the CEO is, "Hey, overarchingly, how do we make food safety culture allow you to lead the whole entire organization more efficiently? And you become a better leader. And instead of saying these things and stuff like that, where are we having a disconnect and break?
Or here's a food safety event that happened over here that we're seeing could happen over here. How do we make sure that our crisis management plan is good so that when you go out and you speak to consumers about if something were to happen, how do I make your job better at that?" Because the CEO is going to be worried about, what if there is a crisis and I have to get out there?
And as you're coaching that CEO through that process, you're starting to get them into buying into food safety culture, right? Thinking it in terms of each individual position and how they would see it, and this is literally the trainings [00:36:00] that we've been doing. That communication is super important to learn because you, just like you said, Francine, about the getting lost in the process.
You gotta think of this in terms of three years, not what's happening now, and strategize your communication to get to that end point over three years. And so what needs to be done now? What needs to be done a year from now? What needs to be done two years from now? What needs to be done then to get to that three-year point?
Does that make sense?
Francine: 100% makes sense. In my head, it's funny because I was thinking about not companies, but like in that sense, but like as a company, we had to demographically think about how we spoke to people, because you couldn't speak to people and say the same things in the Northeast that you could say in the Southeast.
Matt: 100%.
Francine: And you had to have different conversations with people in the Midwest than what [00:37:00] you had on the West Coast. 100%. It was all terminology, tone of voice, just the conversations were entirely different when you were speaking with these people in general. So people that are writing scripts, it just doesn't...
You've got to know what you're doing when you speak with people be- because it doesn't carry across different demographics, different people, loca- just in general, it's different. It is so different. I'll never forget the first time that I spoke in Connecticut. I knew immediately as soon as my mouth opened, I needed to change what I was saying and the way I spoke.
Matt: Yes Yes
Francine: It's like you're not gonna be alive. These people are gonna eat you.
Matt: Yes. When I was in my early 20s, I was training facilities on food safety. Okay? Just passing a food safety audit. This is for GFSI. This is before SQF, [00:38:00] BRC, all that sort of type of stuff. Just the basics of GMP. We were working as a middle man between retailers, and we...
Our job was to try to help their suppliers get basic GMPs. This is so long ago, people didn't even know what the acronym of GMP was. So I was talking to people in Alabama, and I will never forget, I called this lady up. She knew that we were gonna be talking about GMPs. I was walking through, and I was prepping for the meeting where I was gonna go to their facility and walk her through this stuff.
And I started talking, and three times she told me, "Sonny, please slow down." But, like, in this long, slow, drawn-out Southern accent. "You just talk too fast, Sonny. You just talk too fast. You talk too fast. Can you please slow down?" And I, I had to go, 'cause living in the central coast of California, I had to go find [00:39:00] people that I knew were from the South just so they could help coach me on how to speak to people in the South because it was just such a different thing.
It was so different.
Francine: So I learned, because I worked all over the country and spoke to people all over the country. So I taught myself the different phrases, the different terminology. Again, because my brain looks, works like it does, I just need to be in... And sometimes this is very embarrassing. I just need to be in an area for a little while-
Matt: Yeah
Francine: and I start to pick up their accent-
Matt: Yep ...
Francine: and the way they speak.
Matt: Yep.
Francine: And so it doesn't take me long. I'll never forget, I was talking to my daughter's neighbor one time, and she's from somewhere down in the Caribbean, might be Turks and Caicos or somewhere. Standing there talking to her for, like, 15 [00:40:00] minutes, and the next thing I knew, I started speaking with her accent.
Matt: Yeah.
Francine: And Matt, I'm gonna tell you, I was mortified. And I'm gonna tell you, I sounded just like her. She had to think, "What is happening with this woman?" And good God, what is happening to me? And I went into my daughter's house when we were done talking. No, I was leaving. I called her when we were done talking.
I'm like, "Oh my God, you're not gonna believe what I just did. I am mortified." And yeah
Matt: Yeah, that happens with me when I'm in certain parts of Mexico after I'm there for a while. It is the cadence. Really, it's not the accent as much as the cadence.
Francine: The dialect. I'll pick up the dialect.
Matt: Yes.
Francine: Yes. It's-
Matt: But the, the cadence is the
So When people are speaking, for me, understanding different accents is actually really [00:41:00] easy after I've been with them for a little bit of time. I'll give you an example of what happened to me with one of my companies. So I got hired by a company that was an Australian company. They had a company in the States, and the guy who I was working with was Australian that lived in the States.
Okay? Completely different accent, completely different cadence. I hired one of my managers from the previous company I was at to help me, and he is Chilean, okay? Completely different cadence, completely different accent. They were trying to talk to each other, okay, both in English, okay? Neither one of them could understand a single word they were saying.
They called me into a three-way conversation to translate English to English. Okay? When I try to help people understand accents, I tell people it's not the accent [00:42:00] itself that is the issue, it's the cadence at which they say the words. And if you can change your brain to understand, like, the way that syllables get put together and the speed at which syllables bounce off of each other, and fucking, I don't know, I have no way of saying it.
But they're saying the same syllables, they're just saying it at different speeds with different pronunciation of those syllables. If you can understand the speed of that pronunciation, then all of a sudden that bouncing becomes, in my brain, a little less. And the Indian accent is actually the hardest one for me, and it's because the way...
But after listening to it for a little bit, I could get back into it. But it's fascinating, and then when I'm in that country for a little bit or when I'm in that region, I will change my speech, the way I say things, the speed at which I pronounce things. Maybe my pronunciation doesn't change, but the speed and [00:43:00] cadence at which I say those syllables do, and then all of a sudden the understanding happens easier on both sides.
That is a very minute description of exactly what we're talking about, getting people to understand things on a broader level.
Francine: I forget where I w- was on the East Coast, but I had just come back from the Midwest, and somebody in the room said, "Are you from the Midwest?" I said, "No, I just spent the last few days there."
It all changes as the day goes along. I'm not gonna lie to you, before the day's over, it's, it'll all be good. And so we- And
Matt: in the States, each state has different accents.
Francine: Oh.
Matt: Within those
Francine: states- Slovenia has, like, 15 different dialects.
Matt: I know
Francine: You know, you travel, we live right in the South Central. So I go to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, I had to learn, do I say soda?
Do I say pop? Do I say hoagie or do I say sub? Because God forbid you say Sheetz or Wawa on the wrong side [00:44:00] of the state.
Matt: Yeah. 100%. Okay. Well, to wrap this up, culture matters, leadership matters. You can't have good food safety culture without good food safety culture leadership. And how you get that buy-in To change the behaviors, to ultimately train them, means you may have to change your behaviors just to relate to the people that make the decisions.
Francine: Which apparently we have both learned to do very well.
Matt: It was probably a survival mechanism for me, just living in a whole bunch of different homes when I was a kid. Just having to understand the culture of every home I was in and adapt myself to whatever new environment I was in. I think that's why it just became natural for me.
Francine: I think that some of it is my brain just naturally works that way, and some of it is that I was just, was very [00:45:00] naturally a chameleon growing up, and I'm very grateful that I was, because I needed to be.
Matt: All right. Well, on that note, don't eat poop