Before you read this book, fi rst let me tell you about who is writing it and why.

I fi rst

became interested in writing this book a year after I started my fi rst industry-related

job where I became responsible for leading food and product safety at a major food

retail business. Prior to this job, I had extensive training and experience in manage-

ment as a government chief scientist in the US Public Health Service (at the Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention, Epidemic Investigations Laboratories), as a

military biological threats of fi cer (United States Army Reserves, Consequence

Management Unit), and as a university assistant research professor (Infectious

Diseases Division of Emory University School of Medicine). However, I had little

business experience nor could I fi nd a speci fi c resource on how to lead a retail orga-

nizations food safety management program.

The food retail business I work for is a restaurant company that buys ingredients,

products, and packaging, from various manufactures; distributes these components

to currently over 1,700 plus restaurants in 39 states and District of Columbia; and

then produces/packages fresh made food in these restaurants, serving over two mil-

lion customers a day. When I became the one responsible for food and product

safety within this organization (literally concerned about the public health of over

two million customers a day), I started to look at this responsibility fi rst as a public

health professional, studying the risk, requesting resources, and developing and

implementing tools and procedures as a means for the intervention of the risk. I

quickly learned, though, that this was only part of the process. I needed to learn how

to integrate this public health scope into the business processes within the organiza-

tion if I was to be successful in sustaining the bene fi ts of my professional input.

So I did what most business professionals already do; I built relationships with

key stakeholders within my organization to learn their business needs, studied the

management methods of other food safety professionals within the food industry,

sought knowledge through public health organizations tasked to regulate food

national food safety organizational meetings (e.g., Food Safety Summit, International

Association for Food Protection, National Environmental Health Association,

Chapter 1

Introduction

1 Introduction

American Society of Microbiology) and took courses in public health management

developed by Harvard School of Public Health and risk management training at the

FDA’s Joint Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition (JIFSAN). Through this journey,

I developed the knowledge to build a model that helped me organize and manage the

work necessary to ensure food safety in a food retail business. You may be wonder-

ing why I didn’t ask other food safety business professionals to write different chap-

ters of this book or provide their management principals as part of my thesis. This

certainly could have expanded the scope with different perspectives used to suc-

cessfully manage food safety in a retail organization; perhaps a book with these

perspectives should be written next. However, my primary objective was to write

this book from the perspective of a public health professional that has researched,

bench marked, and applied many of the best practices in food safety directly to the

management of a retail food safety management program. The reader can fi ll in

additional knowledge as it relates to the speci fi c needs/culture of their retail food

business using this book as a guide.

Public Health Responsibility

Many food safety professionals who have worked and currently work in the food

retail industry work with the same dedication and initiative as most public health

professionals tasked to prevent foodborne illnesses; just look at the names on the

boards and membership list of most industry trade and nonpro fi t originations that
support food safety improvement (including professional development groups

within these organizations). Each of these food safety professionals take on the

dif fi cult responsibility for food safety within their organization (i.e., are held

accountable for food safety), and also many work outside of their organizations to

foster improvements in retail food safety (via benchmarking, service on local, state,

and federal government boards, speaking/training, writing, etc.) seeing food safety

as a noncompetitive part of the business.

Even though public health (CDC, FDA, USDA), academic scientist, and retail

and manufacturing food safety professionals have worked together for many years

to improve food safety, we continue to see unnecessary outbreaks of foodborne

illnesses and deaths similar to the tragic events of the past that initiated public

demand to improve. Take, for example, the multistate outbreak of listeriosis linked

to whole cantaloupes from Jensen Farms in Colorado, United States, in 2011.

Without going into the details of how this outbreak occurred (some of which is still

speculative), cantaloupes were linked to 147 illnesses and 33 deaths (and one mis-

carriage due to the illness) in 28 states (CDC 2012a ). Unfortunately, based on our

current means to communicate national recalls of adulterated foods (via press

reports by the government and/or industry), and poor means to quickly trace back

foods to original sources of cultivation and/or production, the outbreak continued

to cause illnesses and deaths 47 days (see Fig. 1.1 ) after the announcement of the

likely source of the outbreak (whole or fresh cut cantaloupes linked to Jensen Farms).