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Food Safety Culture in Food Businesses

'Food safety culture' is about attitudes, behaviours and the priority given to food safety in an organisation. In a food business, it is how everyone (owners, managers, employees) thinks and acts in their daily job to make sure the business’s food is safe.

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In a strong food safety culture, people take both responsibility and care in producing safe food. They understand the importance of making safe food and the consequences of things going wrong. People have the right knowledge and skills and a genuine commitment to doing things the right way, every time.

Food safety culture starts at the top but needs support from everyone across the business. It includes all food handlers, and people involved in cleaning, maintenance, purchases, recruitment and other activities, as they contribute to the business’s food safety and culture too.

People are the key to food safety systems working properly.

It is people who make the decisions, handle the food, use and maintain equipment and clean things up.

Why is food safety culture important?

In Australia, people expect to enjoy their food with the assurance it is safe to eat. A good food safety culture in your business can protect:

  • consumers from illnesses and death from unsafe food,
  • your brand’s reputation,
  • your business from financial loss.

Preventable problems

Each year in Australia there are approximately:

  • 4.7 million cases of foodborne illness, with contaminated food causing about 47,900 hospitalisations and 38 deaths
  • 80 food recalls, mostly due to contamination by disease-causing microorganisms or allergens that were not listed on the label.

Despite having legislation, standards, quality assurance programs and other food safety systems in place, sometimes things go wrong. Problems with unsafe food have been linked to poor hygiene practices or mistakes by people handling food and equipment, even when people are trained, and businesses are inspected and audited. These problems are largely preventable, if there is a strong food safety culture in the business.

Where to start

You can improve your business’s food safety culture through three steps:

  1. Know – know what your business’s food safety culture is (e.g. assess it with a questionnaire/survey);
  2. Do – do something to improve the culture (e.g. improve communications on food safety, allocate funding for equipment); even small steps can make a difference; 
  3. Follow through – monitor food safety progress and commit to continually improving.


Food Standards Australia and New Zealand has some useful resources for food businesses, including Food Safety Culture.

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