Convenience Matters Intro:
[Music] You’re listening to Convenience Matters brought to you by NACS. Whether it’s for food, fuel, drinks, or snacks, about half the U.S. population shops at a convenience store every day. We’ll talk about what we see at stores and what the future may hold for our industry.

Chris Blasinsky:
If there’s one thing that customers come to convenience stores for it’s food, whether it’s fresh, prepared commissary or from a fountain food service is a huge part of our industry. And along with food service comes food safety. So today we’re talking with Dr. Lone Jespersen of Cultivate, who basically created a model for food safety culture. And we’re going to talk to her and find out more about that. I am Chris Blasinsky with NACS.

Jeff Lenard:
And I’m Jeff Lenard with NACS.

Chris Blasinsky:
And Lone, welcome!

Lone Jespersen:
Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you, Jeff.

Chris Blasinsky:
So let’s just dive right in here. What is food safety culture? What are we talking about here?

Lone Jespersen:
Good question, Chris. it’s obviously something we talk a lot about, and there’s a reason for that. Food safety culture is the summation of all of our assumptions. That’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? But essentially it is you go into a convenience store. It might be 30 people working in that on hours at all times of the day. And each of them carry a mindset on some assumptions with them around what is important to the success of their job and the store that they ‘re part of and whether food safety is part of that mindset and those thoughts and those collective thoughts are really what food safety culture is.

Chris Blasinsky:
Sure. And we’re not, we’re not talking about, you know, reinventing the culture of an organization, right? Like one of the things that you have, you have said repeatedly to me in our conversations is that every organization has a culture.

Lone Jespersen:
It warms me {indiscernible} because it is really something that we have to acknowledge. And it’s not just the convenience store industry. It is to say as a food business, be that a convenience store, a food manufacturer, a restaurant. If you handle food, you have a food safety culture. You might not like it. You might not think it’s effective. You might love it, but you have one. Right?

Chris Blasinsky:
Okay. And we can back up a second. Because we did meet you several years ago. And with Kwik Trip out of Wisconsin Dr. Jay Ellingson and his team have an in-service event every year and they on the forefront of food safety, right? It’s, it’s a top down. It’s driven from Don Zitlow, the owner they are very fortunate to have that. Not a lot of companies do. And so that’s how we met you, {we} were introduced to this concept basically. And as we’ve, you know, over the years, the FDA food and drug administration has come out with their, you know, their four pillars for advancing food, safety, food, safety culture is one of them. So what do you think is this driving force in this emphasis of food safety culture,

Lone Jespersen:
But I think it’s an acknowledgement off that there’s a certain evolution to any type of culture, and we’ve seen it in safety. We’ve seen it in other areas as well. We start out by looking at being compliant. So we have a set of requirements. We try to deliver on those consistently. Then we go into the next stage of the evolution, which is the plan. Now we start to self-assess against that. So we might have some audits that we rely on. And thirdly, we evolve into that. We don’t have to need to have a regulator or somebody external prompt us. We don’t have to have the audits prompt us. We just take action on food safety every day, because it’s part of the success of our business. And that’s where we get to culture. So we’ve made some tremendous leaps in food safety across the globe over the last 25 years, but we’ve also come to a bit of a plateau.

Lone Jespersen:
So having had a chance to interview quite a number of your members for the NACS food safety culture model. What I really realize is that the convenience store sector is probably at that requirement’s early stage evolution when it comes to food safety, even a company like Kwik Trip that is at the forefront, like you said, is still reliant on having audits in those stores to make sure that food safety is acted on. So I think we are at this point now, where if we want to improve and really deliver on what we all trust, which is we walk into a convenience store, we pick up a food or a drink, and we trust in inherently without questioning that it’s safe for consumption. If we really want to deliver on that consistently and all the time as an industry. And we have to get to the culture step in that evolution. And that’s really what’s driving it, Chris, because we’re unfortunately still seeing that people get sick and worst case lose their lives from food that is being prepared by others. And unless we take that step into where food safety is just part of doing business, across everybody, then we’re always going to be stuck in that mode where people get sick. And I don’t know about you, and, but I’m fed up, I’m fed up with that status quo and I want to bring it to the next level.

Chris Blasinsky:
I think you touched on just there in closing up your comments, how you have become passionate about this. And I think our listeners would like to hear the story of how you became involved with this given your background and, you know, I want to hear the story. That’s a great story. And it’s, it’s a passionate one and I think it needs to be heard.

Lone Jespersen:
It’s a sad story, right? It’s really a story. And it’s in 2008 and I would wake up in the morning every day and consume my food really ignorant to the fact that I could be safe from that food. If things went wrong, never thought about food safety. And I was proud of it, a very large organization, Canada Maple Leaf Foods. I’ve been with the company for a good four years. Hadn’t had never really been introduced to food safety. And I was proud of food company. I looked out for continuous improvement and we did wonderful things. And then in 2008 in August 21, on August 23rd, we were actively connected by a DNA testing to the death of 23 Canadians. 23 Canadians who had consumed sliced meat that was made on our watch. And, and I remember exactly where I was when I was notified of this. I was driving down the road and I know what the tree looked like; the shade of blue, the sky was and couldn’t believe that we had a taken the trust of our consumers into our hands and we had completely neglected it. So after that from 2008 to 2015, my job was to rewrite the food safety strategy with our newly hired Chief of Food Safety Officer, Dr. Andy Hoffman, and really take an organization that was completely shattered because of this, because Maple Leaf is a very proud and a really hopping, energetic, fantastic organization – still is today – but take this organization and try, and mend our wounds by really acknowledging that we had to create change to our culture because we had a past external audits. So back to the evolution, we met requirements from regulators. We did internal self-assessments internal audits, and we had a completing like you have to do look at mindsets and behaviors.

Lone Jespersen:
Senior leaders didn’t necessarily look at food safety, performance KPIs and there wasn’t really a good rhythm or acknowledgement that food safety had to be at the table every day. So it is a sad story. And it’s one that Michael McCain, CEO of Maple Leaf consistently says that the consumers and the families of those that lost somebody have a right to forget, but we don’t. So when you go through something like that, it then changes who you are. And, and that’s what I wake up in the morning every day, and want to work with my colleagues at Cultivate to avoid others from having to go through it.

Jeff Lenard:
And you alluded to the fact that you’re now working with NACS on developing this maturity model, which is it’s incredibly important because our industry is, is newer to the food game. And there are still people that don’t necessarily think “I’m going to go to the gas station to get food that that’s beyond packaged.” So as we look at food safety culture, I’d almost like to separate the two phrases. I think people think food safety and they think, well, you know, if it, if it hits expiration date, I throw it out. You know, that’s food safety. But the culture is the really key word that has really become a big part of the discussion because you have to have the culture that supports all these higher level ideas that you need to communicate with food safety. Because if people aren’t on the same page, it doesn’t matter how you suggest things happen. So can you talk a little bit about the culture element, which is critical to the phrase food safety culture?

Lone Jespersen:
So {indiscernible} and I don’t know if that you separate them, Jeff. And if it was up to me, if we were to do this all over again, with a focus on food safety culture, I would never call it that because a company has a culture and it’s in essence it’s identity. So, and it’s part of building food safety into the identity of an organization. That’s what we’re talking about. And we do that by looking at what are some of those strengths and weaknesses that a culture has. And I think that’s where the NACS food safety culture model is really going to be quite powerful because it’s going to help your members plot themselves on a model and say, “where are we strong in our culture? And where might we have some gaps or some weaknesses?” And if we go down and look at the very foundation of culture, I know we talk a lot about leadership engagement and setting the tone.

Lone Jespersen:
It’s actually relatively easy to get senior leadership team to talk about safety on a regular basis to show, to walk the talk is most good as quite a contained group. And it’s about getting them the right messaging and making sure they understand why this is important, what it does to their business, when it gets a little tricky. And that’s where the convenience store industry is really unique is, you have all of these subcultures versus a subculture by store. That’s very influenced by who the store manager is. And if she is really engaged in food safety, understands the significance of it, might have a personal connection to food safety, for whatever reasons. There’s a higher likelihood that food safety will be part of the identity of that store and identity where we show itself in that when you come into work, you might have on a regular basis, there’s a conversation around food safety in our store.

Lone Jespersen:
What does it mean to us? Why is it important? We might have a peer review where we look at each other and say, how are we doing with food safety? They could give each other feedback. And we might look at, well, this particular type of knife and glove doesn’t actually really work so well when we’re under pressure because the customers are lining up in front of us. Could we innovate around that so that it’s still safe, but it also allows us to do our job. So food safety is part of the identity as for what makes that store successful now. And it’s not hard to imagine what the opposite of that looks like. I think,

Jeff Lenard:
And in our industry, we have a lot of smaller operators, newer innovators joining the industry. So they may not have somebody with a doctor in the title that is looking at food safety. That’s why it’s so critical to be working with you. What about for those smaller operators with just a few stores? What are the basics that they can do that align with what some of the bigger companies could do that have somebody with a doctor on staff?

Lone Jespersen:
Yeah. Good question. I think if you take food safety and you boil it down to the very foundational elements, there’s elements around cleanliness, there’s elements around knowing the hazards that you’re dealing with. So are you dealing with preparation where temperature of a piece of product is important? Find the basics of what, what your food safety system is in your store? It doesn’t actually really matter if you are 10 people, two people, or you have 2000. The basics. Get down to the basics, right? And then find a way to explain that to those you work with in a way where, this is what it is, and this is why it’s important. We have a real tendency as food safety professionals to have all these head tools. And what that means is -here’s a standard, here’s a thermometer and here are your gloves. So we get all of the rationale. We have the tools we have the standard, we have these head tools. We sometimes get all of us running around with a beating heart and take those head tools and turn them into something that connects with some heart tools. So yes, we have the temperature that needs to be at a certain level consistently. And here’s why, because they can be something surviving in this food or added to this food that can make somebody really sick. Now let’s talk about a personal story of that. So link that personal story to why you’re taking that temperature. And I think Jeff, I’m not sure it matters with size because some of those basic things are the same. So seek out some materials seek out some content that, and there’s lots of that out. Then you can use to say, Hey, let’s about temperature. And maybe you question or you make a little game out of it.

Lone Jespersen:
You have your 10 people in the store who might be at an average age of 22. And you give them all a little sticky thermometer, and you say, you go home and put that in your refrigerator. Let’s talk about how cool it is and why it’s important that it’s at a certain level. So you’re putting sort of a little bit of interaction, you’re putting the heart in it because now they’re going home and they’re taking safety into their homes and they are now going to carry that with them throughout life. So I think we have to acknowledge that biggest necessarily better. And that when it comes to food safety, we need to keep it simple.

Chris Blasinsky:
Yeah. You know, over the, over the years, even you know, Jay Ellingson from Kwik Trip has sort of become a mentor for me in this space. You know, we converse a lot and he’s very passionate about food safety, as I’ve learned that most people within this profession are. He’s really helping us change the way we talk about food safety. We’re protecting public health and that’s kind of is his mantra. And he’s very forthcoming about this statement that food safety is not a competitive advantage. If one of us goes in the supply chain, we all go. And you know, it really helped me, early on, learning more about food safety to hear that from him. And he is a driving force within this industry. And he is part of the reason, most of the reason, why we have engaged with you on the food safety culture risk model. So, he wasn’t the only one that you interviewed, right? Like, so you interviewed 20 different retailers from around the world. And I can only imagine that the things that you heard, right. To be a fly on the wall, ’cause NACS doesn’t know, we were not involved with the interviews at all. Given the industries that you have worked with, specifically manufacturing, what are some of the, you know, the aha moments or the eye opening moments that you learned for this industry that are really going to help us drive forward?

Lone Jespersen:
There’s three things that really stood out for me. And I’ll just really briefly try and give you some perspective on the three without giving anybody away. Because as you said, it was confidential when we did the interviews. Agility, invisibility, and proximity. Lovely words – they just roll off your tongue. And the about agility, this is, this is something that I am completely energized by the convenience sector by it. It is an industry that takes change and just picks it up and moves with it. Right? when I, so I’m a manufacturing rep by heart, I’ve been in manufacturing my entire life. So seeing how a convenience store company is able to just pivot around and I’m not talking about COVID here, it’s about new product launches, it’s about reacting to not having the staff on in the store and how they manage with all of that. I think there’s just an agility around that, that is so admiring and can be used to so much for food safety. So that’s one thing. The other thing is around invisibility. And that’s essentially because of the 21 people that I interview, I think three of them have food safety and the title, the rest were food service, something and the managing multiple areas sometimes. And even if they’re not, and just focused on food safety, there’s still not food safety and food service. And I think, I think we have to acknowledge that the unspoken is often forgotten. I have this same conversation with a, with companies in Australia in general because they just don’t use the food safety. And I think that’s a big change we have to ignore. It has to happen in the convenience store. We actually have to formalize this something called food safety, and then it’s business critical and let’s call it out.

Lone Jespersen:
The third thing is proximity. And that’s something that I think is really different for convenience stores as well. If you are a line operator in a milk powder plant, all you see is beautiful stainless steel all day. And it’s really hard to translate that into, but that can make somebody sick because you never see anything resembling product or anybody eating. When you’re in a convenience store, you have the consumer right in front of you. You’re looking at the people in the eye, that’s going to go away and eat what you might just have prepared or sold them or handled. So I think that proximity is really important because if we can look, if I can look Chris in the eye and Jeff in the eye, and I know that I have just taken a shortcut, and I know that because of that, I could have introduced something that can make you sick. I mean, you’ve got to be a special person for that not to tug at your heart string, right? So I think that agility in visibility and proximity are some, some themes that we’ve played with in the NACS food safety culture, risk model as well, because, and those are unique and unique to the convenience store industry in a beautiful way. But also with some opportunity for improvement, I would say.

Jeff Lenard:
Thinking about the context. love your example about giving people thermometers and taking them home. And all of a sudden they see things differently. And then what you just were talking about there with proximity, where you see the customer, I think that makes it very relatable so that it takes it from the head and puts it right there with a heart where people draw the connection, because we talk in our industry, it’s like, you know, the ultimate is when you have a job, that’s more than a job, that’s more than a paycheck where you’re doing something positive. it could be around anything in the community that makes it better. And, certainly food safety is a huge one of those particularly coming out of the pandemic, looking at how more food service will be out there. And it will be out there in different ways because people will expect more curbside. They’ll expect more home delivery. They’ll expect all of these things. You use that word pivot earlier, and you said not related to COVID, but yes, that word is overused with COVID, but there are so many more things that will be coming out of this where food safety and food safety culture go hand in hand. And we need to build this out and make sure that we are rock solid on the foundation here, because you can’t take shortcuts with food safety.

Lone Jespersen:
No, and I think we can’t, we forget either, Jeff that if strong mature food safety culture is also one where there’s generally just better control and more proactivity in the store. So people are just more proactive in looking for risks, managing food safety. You don’t have to now react to something having happened. And that has a direct connection to also the profitability of an organization. We’ve known this for a long, long time with manufacturing, the cost of poor quality goes down as you mature your culture around quality. And I don’t personally have the data yet. I’m hoping that we will one day, but I have no reason to believe that it’s also not true in a convenience store.

Chris Blasinsky:
Yeah. I anticipate that we will have more conversations about this. Hopefully either this format or in our magazine, or hopefully we’ll get you at the NACS Show once, you know, we’re able to, and to get you in front of our industry and really talk about this the way that we’ve seen you talk about it for Kwik Trip.It is powerful and it is something that I feel very confident that our membership will embrace and really, you know, drive this forward. With any culture, it is a journey, it is not a destination. I mean, this is a long-term project for us. And, it’s, it’s something that we’re really excited about. And hopefully the members who have brought this to our attention are excited about it too. So we’re really excited to get it, you know, move it forward.

Chris Blasinsky:
And to continue working with you because you you’re great to talk to you. You laugh, you make fun of me. I love it. And you help me with things that, that I need, with magazine articles. And I see you pop up all the time within the food safety world with webinars and articles and things like that, you truly are an expert and we’re really, really lucky to have you on our side and helping on our memberships. So with that, we thank you. And we look forward to talking again.

Jeff Lenard:
Also I’m the one that’s not the coauthor on some of these next magazine articles. So if you haven’t read the NACS Magazine article that they coauthored, there’s another one as well, or you can go to NACSMagazine.com and find out more on food safety and food safety culture. Now Dr. Jesperson one final thing. How can people find you if, whether it’s a retailer or whether it’s somebody in the manufacturing community to learn more about food safety and how they might work with you.

Lone Jespersen:
I suggest look us up on Cultivatefoodsafety.com. And, I have the pleasure of working with some fantastic colleagues that are equally passionate about food safety across the world, and we are always good for a conversation.

Jeff Lenard:
Well, thank you. And thank you all for listening to Convenience Matters.

New Speaker:
[Music] Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.