Interview Dr. Vanessa R Coffman, Director Of Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness

In this interview, Vanessa Coffman, Director of the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness, discusses their efforts to improve food safety culture.

She highlights the award-winning toolkit they created, which provides resources and guidance for companies to strengthen their food safety practices. Vanessa emphasizes the importance of prioritizing food safety culture even amidst competing interests like time and cost pressures. She also addresses the challenges of implementing good food safety culture, suggesting the toolkit as a valuable resource for quality managers.

• Hello Vanessa ! Can you introduce yourself and Stop Foodborne Illness ?

My name is Vanessa Coffman. I am the director of the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness. It's a program that's housed at Stop Foodborne Illness, the organization, and the Alliance really works on food safety culture, expanding its impact and improving it across the industry. We have about 20 big food companies, international companies, that are working on their internal food safety culture collaboratively with one another, but they're also working on resources that can be shared outside of those companies to their supply chain.

• Could you give us concrete examples of the work you’re doing ?

Greatest example would be the toolkit. We just won the IAFP Food Safety Innovation Award for the toolkit. It is a wonderful resource that houses a bunch of different aspects of food safety culture and things that you should be thinking about when you're improving your company's food safety culture, things you can share with people on your teams, ways that you can help, etc. Build that culture, pathways that you might think about when you're developing a plan, communication tools to let people know in your organization what you're working on, and a lot of great videos. I think those are kind of the cornerstone of the toolkit. They feature Stop Foodborne Illness constituents, so people who have been personally impacted by food safety issues. And those videos are really, really impactful. And we have six of them currently, and we're working to have more than 30 by the end of the year.

• What rising trends have you witnessed during your work ?

Well, I think in terms of the alliance, something we've had our eye on is people adopting food safety culture and really thinking about how they can weave that into everything that they're doing within their organizations. And because we work in an international space, some people are being regulated on their food safety culture, some aren't. In the U.S., there's no regulations for food safety culture. That's why we're trying to keep apprised of how things are developing in Europe. In general, no matter if you're being regulated or not, it is more about thinking on how to improve what you do every day when no one's watching.

Nobody wants to make anybody sick, right? Everybody wants to do the right thing.

But how do we keep doing the right thing, even under the face of competing interests with time and cost?

• You mentioned that some countries are more regulated than others, especially on the topic of food safety culture. Do you feel that regulation is keeping pace with all the societal changes that we have? Or are there still a long way before reaching an optimal regulation and landscape?

In the U.S., the FDA in particular has come out very strongly saying that they will never regulate food safety culture.  Governments move slow, even in the best case scenario. So I think it is really wonderful that the industry is working so hard and collaboratively to work on this problem themselves and address the issue without having to resort to any sort of regulation or regulatory pressure.

Here's the link to download the toolkit : https://stopfoodborneillness.org/toolkit/

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