Safety Isn’t an Afterthought. It’s Your Operating Model
In 2024, the U.S. food and beverage industry recorded nearly 300 recalls, costing $1.9 billion in direct expenses. That figure doesn’t include lawsuits, lost shelf space, or the roughly 30% of consumers who say a recall permanently damages their trust in a brand. The same year, 220,000 workplace injuries were recorded across the industry.
I’ve spent over 30 years in manufacturing, many of them in food and beverage. When I look at those numbers, I’m not surprised — because almost none of it is random. These aren’t freak accidents. They’re predictable failure modes that trace back to process gaps, leadership gaps, and cultural gaps that existed long before anything went wrong. The recall, the injury — that’s just what becomes visible. The real problem was already there, hidden below the surface. That’s the iceberg problem, and I see it in facility after facility.
What Leaders See vs. What’s Actually There
I recently participated in The Manufacturing Edge podcast for an episode called “Beyond Recalls & Recordables: A Safety Playbook for Protecting Profit in Food & Beverage.” We dug into how poor food safety culture doesn’t just hurt people — it quietly drains profit, capacity, and brand trust, and what a practical, proven playbook looks like to cut risk at the source, tighten daily execution, and protect margin.
This is where leaders need to change their mindset. Most operations leaders track recordables and recall rates. They review HACCP documentation. What they often don’t see is whether any of it is working on the floor.
I’ve walked facilities with beautiful HACCP plans — documented critical control points, monitoring frequencies, corrective action procedures. Then I’ll ask an operator what the CCPs are, and they can’t tell me. That’s not an example of food safety management systems. That’s paperwork. There’s a world of difference between documentation that lives in a binder and standards that are embedded in daily operations.
The same goes for end-of-line inspection. Relying on downstream checks to catch contamination is a lagging control. By the time you find the problem, it’s already in the product. Safety — like quality — has to be built into the process. You can’t inspect it in at the end. Our data consistently shows safety prevention delivers three to five times the ROI compared to reactive spending.
Three Places Safety Breaks Down
The failures almost always trace back to one of three domains.
Production floor.
Biological contamination and allergens drive 76% of food and beverage recalls — and these are predictable, not random. When I see a facility with allergen-driven recalls, my first question is always: what does your changeover and sanitation verification procedure look like? In almost every case, there’s a gap. I’ve always believed 5S isn’t just an organization tool — in food and beverage, it’s a safety tool. A visually managed environment where deviations are immediately obvious is your first line of defense against contamination.
People.
Food and beverage is a high-turnover industry. I’ve worked with facilities running annual turnover north of 40%, meaning a significant portion of the workforce, at any given time, is relatively new — and new workers get hurt at dramatically higher rates than veterans. If your safety training is a one-time onboarding module, you don’t have a safety program. Near miss reporting tells you more about a safety culture than recordables do. Low near miss rates don’t mean fewer close calls — they usually mean workers have learned that raising issues doesn’t lead anywhere. That’s a food safety culture problem.
Supply chain.
I see this one consistently underestimated. Supplier approval gets treated as a one-time qualification. Ownership changes, facilities expand, ingredients shift — and nobody goes back to reassess. Your brand reputation is only as strong as your weakest supplier link. And the low-cost sourcing decisions that skip compliance visibility can cost you orders of magnitude more in recall and liability exposure. Traceability — the ability to isolate a specific lot — is what separates a contained recall from a catastrophic one.
A Five-Step Path Forward
When I work with food and beverage operations on safety, I follow five steps.
- Assess. Start with an honest diagnostic — ideally with outside eyes, because even experienced operators go snow blind to what’s blaring in front of them. Map the current state and identify the gap between what procedures say and what’s actually happening on the floor.
- Make visible. Quantify the cost of safety gaps — in quality, throughput, and turnover, not just recordables. Making the financial exposure explicit creates the urgency for change.
- Build the structure. Establish a safety committee, define ownership, and embed safety into your CI system. In every Kaizen event I run, I ask for three to five safety improvements alongside whatever operational problem we’re solving. Safety doesn’t sit outside CI — it runs through it.
- Train and do. I’ve seen too many workers trained in a conference room and then walk onto the floor and absorb the bad habits of tenured employees who aren’t following the process. Leaders have to model the culture, not just describe it.
- Sustain. This is always the hardest step. Reaching a truly interdependent safety culture — where safety is owned collectively at every level — takes two to three years of consistent work. There’s no shortcut.
Safety and Performance in Food & Beverage Aren’t a Trade-Off
The facilities I’ve worked with that have the strongest food safety cultures also have the best OEE, the lowest turnover, and the strongest retailer relationships. They’re not safer despite being efficient. They’re both, because of the same underlying discipline.
My challenge to any senior leader reading this: when did you last do a candid, honest assessment across all three areas — your production floor, your people, and your suppliers?
Find it before it finds you.
TBM Consulting Group helps food and beverage manufacturers build safety management systems that translate into measurable operational and financial performance. Learn more about our food and beverage industry expertise.
