JULY 20239safety. A thriving food safety culture is one in which each employee understands their specific responsibilities regarding food safety. It includes activities such as the continuous implementation of employee education related to food safety and quality, checking process compliance with the requirements of food safety standards, implementation of internal factory inspections of production facilities and the environment, management of foreign bodies in production facilities and risk analysis related to food safety, such as food protection and food fraud. Organizational safety culture could also be defined as "how people in the company behave when no one is looking".Achieving these goals requires effective quality management, which implies continuous improvement activities at every operational level and functional area of the organization. Quality management combines the commitment, discipline and increasing effort of everyone involved in the production process and the fundamental management and control techniques, aiming to improve all processes continuously. For this, industries must be organizationally structured, with established quality policies and programs, measure customer satisfaction, and use appropriate tools and methodologies for risk assessment.Over time, the role of food safety experts has also changed. As the industry grows, technology develops, the demands and awareness of consumers evolve, and so does the understanding of quality management. As a result, every company goes through a certain level of maturity regarding quality management.Therefore, it is important to highlight these stages of quality maturity that start with quality control. Product quality control is limited and focused on corrective inspection, that is, checking the uniformity of the final product by separating non-conforming products. In addition, it aims to identify defects and develop statistical tools for sampling and control, usually by a knowledgeable HACCP team.Quality control is essentially an assessment of the final product before it is released on the market, i.e., at the end of the production chain. Hence, it has limited potential for correcting production defects or upgrading the final product quality by focusing on the inspection aspect of quality management.The next step of maturity item occurs with Quality Assurance.Quality assurance can be defined as "the part of quality management focused on systematic activities and providing confidence that quality requirements will be met".Despite the close connection and involvement in quality management, quality control and quality assurance have fundamentally different goals.Quality assurance aims to prevent defects and nonconformities, while quality control seeks to identify weaknesses.Quality assurance relates to broader control and prevention, ensuring standardized processes and quality in all product acquisition phases through systematic management.This is a proactive approach aimed at a process that would eliminate product defects and includes development and testing.Finally, quality management is part of the strategic scope of the organization, and this phase is called Strategic Quality Management.It represents a vision of market-oriented management, with an eye on opportunities ahead of the competition and customer satisfaction. Inspection control of raw materials and products, laboratory control, hazard analysis and determination of root cause analysis, and audit of systems and suppliers remain fundamental QM pillars. Maturity or evolution has been achieved because the entire organization is included in the quality management vision.Through the support of the management and ownership structure, a culture of food safety includes:Flexibility - To anticipate and configure system requirements in time to minimize risks.Reporting - Employees are encouraged to report safety-related issues. The most crucial ingredient in this culture is trust. Awareness - Like responsiveness, everyone within the system knows what to do as part of a more extensive system.Education - Constant investment of everyone involved in the processes, significantly based on previous mistakes. The enemy of every organization is "business as usual". Food safety professionals put a lot of effort into food safety processes and procedures, meeting mandatory regulations, exceeding food safety standards, and passing food safety audit
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