Global trade challenges food safety and integrity.  Modern food businesses deal with complex food supply chains, often with some elements of uncertainty of origin when sourcing globally, and frequently with multiple legal frameworks and private standards.  People and communication within and between businesses focus our attention on how different organisational and national cultural backgrounds impact food safety management in the global food supply chain.

In order to assure food safety and integrity, the reaction of public and private standard makers tends toward increasing QA requirements, making their standards and requirements more stringent.  This impacts food businesses, requiring a heavy focus on system design and compliance, even when many stakeholders are calling for risk-based approaches.

Recently there has been much discussion of culture and people factors and how these impact food safety management system effectiveness.  This links back to global trade issues and the pressures of dealing with multiple cultures in multiple countries within the global marketplace.  Cultures also exist within different hierarchical levels of food companies and this suggests questions about how to deal with all of these cultures – clearly there is not one approach that fits all.

This complex picture requires businesses to operate their food safety management systems with consistency and adaptability and raises important questions for us all.  Using a panel of expert speakers from industry and research domains, this roundtable will aim to answer the following:

• How do we get everyone working in the same direction and to the same food safety and integrity goals?
• What lessons can we learn from recent scientific research on food safety culture?
• How can food companies adapt to their dynamic environments and inherent food safety risks?
• How can we build positive food safety cultures that integrate effectively with our food safety management systems to deliver product safety and integrity?