Food Safety: In the Trenches - Cover Story - Refrigerated & Frozen Foods Retailer Magazine

Here’s how one leading-edge independent makes it happen.

One June morning, Rosemary Fifield received an alarming call from a refrigerated food supplier: Listeria monocytogenes had been discovered in some product, and all packages had to be pulled off the shelves. Now.

Fifield, then a staff member of the education department at the Hanover Food Co-op in Hanover, N.H., knew how nasty this bug could be. Trained as a microbiologist and having worked in hospitals for several years, she was well aware that Listeria can cause spontaneous abortions and threaten the lives of people who are immunosuppressed.

As product was being removed from display cases and the back room, she huddled with her boss. They decided to ask their IT director if the POS system could identify which customers had purchased the specific product. The 18,000 members who shopped the retailer’s three locations at the time gave out their member numbers at the start of each transaction, so it seemed worth a try.

“It was unknown to us then whether or not we could run the member number information ‘in reverse,’ starting with a UPC, but he agreed to try it and it worked,” Fifield recalls. “The membership database provided their phone numbers and several of us started calling people. We had many, many names to call. I wrote out information about Listeria and gave it to all staff who were making phone calls so they could give accurate information on the risks. Members were amazed and grateful to get the calls. We were afraid they might see this as an invasion of their privacy, knowing we could use their purchasing information in this way, but no one complained.”

What’s noteworthy here is that all this took place back in 1997. Across the country, retailers still get headlines today for using shopper data to handle recalls. But this progressive co-operative, founded 72 years in the shadow of Dartmouth College, was a step ahead.

That was not unusual. Even a brief visit to www.coopfoodstore.com makes it clear that this retailer is a rare consumer advocate. Further evidence: the most recent issue of The Co-op News has 24 pages without a single item-price listing anywhere. Instead, there are articles on the plastic/paper shopping bag debate, energy saving solutions, local charities, cooking classes and — yes — food safety.

The food safety story is written by Fifield, now the director of member education and member services. We wanted to see how a leading-edge smaller retailer handles food safety issues, so we recently lunched with Fifield with a tape recorder running. Joining us were Paul Hoffman, the assistant merchandising director of the Co-op, who oversees perishables and all in-store prepared products, including the commissary kitchen, and Tony White, the merchandising operations director. In addition to overseeing merchandising and operations, White makes sure procedures are followed properly in the stores.

Hoffman, White and Fifield are on the food safety advisory committee at the Co-op. They started the food safety program there, wrote the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and are responsible for all recalls at the stores. Fifield serves as a food safety instructor for regular training sessions for employees. Food safety is taken seriously at the Co-op — knowledge of the SOPs is part of the employee review form.

What are some of the challenges you face in relation to food safety?

Fifield: As an instructor, I can help people understand why they should care about food safety, but I frequently hear how hard it is to implement procedures when you are actually on the floor. For instance, you’re not supposed to wear an apron or white coat out of your department, but it still happens. Or, someone will take out the garbage wearing their apron. Things along those lines. Procedures are known in theory, but in practice things can be different.

White: When we were creating the SOPs, a lot of people felt they were unnecessary. They’d been following certain practices for years, and never had a problem. For example, we have an SOP that says before you cut a watermelon, you need to wash it, wipe it down, and remove all dirt from the outside. I spent 20 years in the produce business, and in all those years we never washed a watermelon. So some people see that policy today and say “That’s crazy. Nobody’s ever gotten sick.” Or, for years you’d take a melon with a brown spot and just cut around it and sell it in halves. That’s not allowed in our SOPs, and some people think all this is over the top. So it’s really important to show people the reasons why these procedures are in place. You have to get people to not just understand it but believe in it, and make it a part of their daily practice. A lot of the major disease outbreaks in the country have been linked to produce items, and people just don’t think of that. You have to constantly educate them, and explain why there is a concern.

Hoffman: I’m a trained chef, so I see things a little differently than employees in the store might. I travel frequently between the stores and our commissary kitchen where there are people with foodservice backgrounds. They’re more familiar with tight controls and the HACCP environment we keep. The challenge is coming into the retail stores where you have a lot of employees with different skill sets and exposure levels. You have to constantly follow up on things, especially when there is any turnover in the workers. You have to be sure that you and your managers are good role models when it comes to food safety. You also have to be constantly in a teaching or training mode. You can never have too much repetition in the perishable departments. This requires just good management practices, doing one-on-one training, making the time and approaching it in the right manner up front. It is easy to embarrass people in front of their peers, and then they have even more resistance. The most important thing is to not create resistance. Lead your people into compliance.

What advice would you give to people in your position?

Hoffman: I’d suggest that they rely on the systems and resources we worked hard to put into place over the years. You don’t have to be the only cop. If an employee is having a problem, you can get assistance with training to get him or her up to speed or compliance. The most important thing is to keep in mind you are always going to have problems. If you don’t, you are doing something wrong. Associates should not take it personally when you correct them, but you also have to keep it in business terms, and just find a solution and move on. You’re going to hear reports of foodborne illness. You’re going to have the health department fail something on inspection when it’s been passing for years. All this is part and parcel of doing business. You need to expect it, and be able to roll with it.

White: It is important to make sure everyone in the stores is aware of how important food safety is. You can get caught up in day-to-day responsibilities, in things that are turning profits and the bottom line. But you have to remain vigilant. Sometimes it takes a bad situation for you to realize how important the integrity of your food is. You have to make sure you never waver. Decisions must always be based on the trust you get from customers. I think our customers have a large amount of trust in us, and we need to make sure we can keep up with the standards they expect of us. You can’t just ignore minor things, because they can build up and hurt your reputation.

Hoffman: We have a reputation with our member owners and the public at large for being focused on food safety issues. People trust us and shop at our stores because of that. In addition, we have a business that is situated across the street from a major medical center, and we have people sent over by their doctors to buy certain products, or to talk to our on-staff dietitian. We have to be very concerned about helping people who are elderly, or who may be immune-suppressed.

Fifield: It is important for the person who does the training to really know their stuff above and beyond what they are teaching that day. My background is in microbiology, and I worked in hospitals for a number of years. That comes in very handy to me, because of the questions we get. If people don’t think you know what you are talking about, or if they don’t think it is relevant to them, then it is very hard for you to get your message across. For example, when questions come up about trichinosis when you’re in the middle of teaching about something else, it’s important to be able to give a complete and confident answer. You need credibility. Before you train, you need the background yourself.

Aside from the Listeria incident in 1997, what experiences related to food safety have produced some concern for you?

White: When I first started with the meat department, it was customary before busy holiday periods to cut roasts ahead of time and freeze them. It was a way to get ahead of things. Then, right before the holiday, the roasts were pulled out of the freezer and piled into U-boats (carts) in the back room. The idea was not to bring them back to room temperature, but to get the chill out. People just didn’t know any better back then, and it was something they’d seen their mother or grandmother do in their kitchens forever. But to me, this was a really big issue. This was a long time ago, and it was a different generation of people. But it was an educational process, and you constantly have to stay aware of changes.

Hoffman: When I started with the Co-op 12 years ago as the first chef in the Hanover store, prepared foods was a fledgling business, doing about 1% of what we do now. We were preparing meat products for the first time, and chilling them down on sheet pans in a regular walk-in. Coming from a restaurant background, the time-temperature relationships here concerned me. So we started developing ways to make sure things were chilled fast enough. When we opened our second store a few years later, it had a professional kitchen and a stronger foodservice orientation. But right away, I started pushing to have a professional kitchen separate from the stores because of all the issues related to time-temperature relationships. When we built our second store, we actually designed the kitchen with a blast chiller so we cold safely and correctly chill. We were one of the first in New Hampshire to do that. That was kind of our turning point as a foodservice-oriented company, and from there we went on quickly to build the commissary kitchen so we could be sure we were on the cutting edge of food safety. All our departments today have monitoring tasks, to check case temperatures store-wide. Maintenance of cases is a big job — especially keeping ice out of open freezer cases, and preventing crashes. Our cases are hooked up to monitoring and alarm systems.

White: It’s inevitable that you’ll have occasional case breakdowns in the stores. It used to be, before we had alarms, that people would think “Hey, this frozen item is still cool, so it’s going to be fine. Just freeze it up again.” That was pretty standard practice in the industry years ago. Now, we have very clear policies. We check the surface with a temp gun first, and then check the inside of the product with a thermometer. If the temperature is above our SOP, the product is pulled and thrown out. A lot of the time people are saying, “What a waste! It can’t be all that bad!” But the reality is that it can be bad.

Fifield: You get some surprises. When this store (Lebanon, N.H.) was new, sun shining through the skylights was heating up the milk and dairy products. We had to address that problem quickly. Another thing that came up in our food safety class today was monitoring case temperatures. It can happen that people will take temperatures and record the fact that the case is out of temp, but not do anything about it. You might get these nice charts that say “Yes, these cases have been above temp for six days in a row.” So while you teach people to take the temps, you also have to make it clear just what they should do when something is wrong and then they need to do it. Also, we instituted SOPs on receiving. There were never any real procedures before. With our small vendors, we had no clue how they were handling the products they were bringing in. In some cases, we had to give them guidelines and even provided them with coolers and said “When you bring products in, we expect them to be cold and in a cooler,” because they weren’t always necessarily doing that. At least now we know it’s not being carried to us in the back of a car and arriving at room temperature.

White: Every vendor is checked at the receiving door. If a vendor comes in over the ideal temperature but within an acceptable range, it is noted and they have a month to be in compliance. If they get two notices, they may not be a vendor to us anymore. Anything chilled that arrives at above 44 degrees is automatically sent back.

Any thoughts on there being no real regulations on how to determine the shelf life of a product, and whether or not what the manufacturer says is accurate?

White: Hopefully there are reputable producers putting codes on products. On frozen products it may not be a food safety issue, but it surely is a quality issue. A lot of times a shopper buys something and it stays in their freezer. I have things in my freezer that have probably been there two years. It sure would be nice to have a date on products so you know what is reasonable in terms of quality and safety. It seems a little crazy not to require codes on products that consumers can’t understand. You may see a notice that once something is thawed, it should be used within 30 days, but how long should it stay frozen?

When did you establish your food safety advisory committee and establish standard operating procedures?

Fifield: It was in 1998 that Paul and I — with our chef and microbiology backgrounds — began talking about how none of our procedures were written down anywhere. That’s also when HACCP was first coming out, and we wanted to be on the forefront of food safety issues. We had a vision of ourselves as HACCP-certified grocery stores, but when we started to look into it we realized we needed to have really well-followed food safety SOPs first. So together we proposed that we form a food safety committee, which was approved by our management team. Paul was chosen for the committee because of his background in food preparation, and I had a background in science. We wanted someone in produce, and Tony (White) was the produce manager at the time. We also included the two food store managers, since they’d be taking the SOPs and making them operable in their stores. The original group included another chef who was working with us at the time. We also brought in a meat manager. We were looking for both expertise and buy-in, so we wanted a mixture of people with technical expertise and people who could take it to the store level and make it happen. We knew the first thing we had to do was write the SOPs to codify everything people should be doing. It’s a very dynamic process, and it’s ongoing. For example, when the food allergen posters came out from the FDA a few years ago, we had to make sure everyone in the stores knew the symptoms of an allergic reaction. We had thought we were doing a really good job, but in fact we were missing a few things like separation of shellfish and crustaceans from finfish in the case. So we had to write another SOP on that. Little things come up periodically. We hadn’t written any SOPs related to demos, so we did that. Now we have food safety teams in each store made up of people who are not on the food safety advisory committee. They aren’t managers or directors of departments, but people who work on the floor. They meet once a month and talk about issues, and they do food safety audits of their stores. So they have audit sheets where they check off things like whether chemicals are kept separate from fresh foods, or whether handwashing stations have all the supplies they should, and so on. It’s a very proactive group that also shares the latest information on what’s going on in the industry regarding food safety. I try to meet with them pretty regularly and give them background info. If E. coli is in the news, we talk about why it is so dangerous, so they can take information back to their departments. They are probably more effective than we are in keeping food safety awareness alive in the stores because they are working in the aisles every day.

The SOPs took about a year to write. We’d identify all the areas we wanted to cover and write some rough drafts, then rework them. We met every two weeks or so at the start, and then monthly. Then we needed to teach it all.

For example, at least every two years we do handwashing training for everybody, whether they work in a perishables department or not. We use a product that shows up only under a blacklight. They put it on their hands and then wash their hands and the blacklight shows what hasn’t been washed away. People see how well they did, and it becomes sort of a game. We do this before the flu and cold season so it is fresh in their minds. Everybody also does an open book SOP test at least every two years. It may be open book, but they have to be familiar enough with the SOPs to find everything and complete all the answers within 30 minutes. All new employees hear about the SOPs during their orientation, and undergo handwashing training. As much as possible, we don’t leave anything to chance.