Determining Your Return on Investment (ROI) for Food Safety Training

By Akhila Vasan

Do you remember the last time you started a new job? All the hours of onboarding. Maybe some basic admin work, like how to submit your timesheet and mark vacation days, and other more content specific tasks.

The longer you’ve been in your role, the more the training blurs together and becomes more mechanical. Worse, we aren’t trained in new work processes, and we often need figure it out by trial and error. The challenge is, we cannot rely on ‘trial and error type’ decisions in food safety, and definitely not in places such as the plant floor.

Effective food safety training is not just the training we receive at onboarding, but the repetitive training at various times. This is to help us understand the ‘why’ and drive ownership and responsibility for everyday tasks. It also helps us reach out to appropriate resources to get answers to questions, be it our manager, a colleague, or an external organization. For the training to be effective, it has to be human centered, helping to connect the problem with the individual, and transcend cultural, generational, and socio-economic barriers. It may seem obvious and almost common sense, but that is often not the case, and often those in food safety have to ‘sell’ the need to have training to financial decision makers.