Developing the 4 C's Approach for Food Safety Culture in a Catering Business as a Tool to Assess and Improve Food Safety Standards

Introduction: "Developing a world class food safety system that will help provide safe food to the customers and several millions that visit the exhibitions each year" is Dubai World Trade Center's commitment towards their customers which drives them to ensure a positive food safety culture is developed & maintained. 

Purpose: The aim of the study was to develop a method to assess the hygiene culture for each of the outlets and find out areas that needs to be improved in the existing hygiene culture 

Methods: Four major components which strongly impact the food safety culture were identified and a questionnaire was developed accordingly for the staff (not including supervisors or managers) to fill out. This method was termed as 'The 4 C's method to analyze food safety culture' namely Commitment; Control (or leadership); Communication and Competence.

Results: The 4 chosen outlets were ranked according to their cumulative year end hygiene audit scores and the cumulative score from the 4 C's questionnaire. The ranking of the outlets according to their audit inspection scores matched exactly the ranking based on the 4 C's questionnaire. Further ranking of the outlets according to the commitment, control, communication & competence sections brought to light that the competence scores of the highest and lowest audit scoring outlets were equal (83%)  thus implying that staffs of the lowest audit scorer had a high caliber and competence skills, however the fall in their audit was due to the low scoring ‘Control’ section (approx. 50%). 

Significance: This 4 C's approach developed by DWTC is a cost effective as well as cost saving innovative research initiative that exposes the exact root cause of the problem and aims at improving upon that target factor to improve and maintain a high food safety culture across all their outlets.