What do people mean by “clean label?” The industry refers to "clean label," but the reality is consumers don't often use that term. What consumers are looking for in food products is transparency, and that includes simple ingredient lists with recognizable ingredients. After all, how many of you have heard this advice in health magazines and lifestyle blogs: "Don't eat it if it has something in it that you can't pronounce."

An effective food industry training program is the cornerstone of a high performing food production or manufacturing facility. Providing the basic knowledge and reinforcing concepts for frontline workers are just two critically important facets of a well-thought-out training system. Here are ten ideas to round out an integrated training program and fully engage your workforce:

It may not be edible, but packaging has a major impact on keeping food safe and displaying to customers the care with which your product is produced. Comprehensive food safety training is just as important for employees in the packaging industry as it is for those in food manufacturing facilities.

Research suggests that the average human attention span has shrunk to an astonishing 8.3 seconds, and people forget 90% of new information within one week. Perhaps not surprisingly, 62% of food industry employees aren’t adhering to their food or workplace safety programs on the floor, which raises a big red flag because it increases the likelihood of safety incidents occurring.

So how can we overcome this tendency to forget and boost employee knowledge retention to support correct and safe behaviors on the floor?

Organizational change and the concept of continuous improvement should go hand in hand. Any continuous improvement journey is just that – a journey, not an end-point. Successful programs will continuously change to meet the needs of the business and stakeholders. Change can bring lots of speed bumps, road blocks, and yield signs if not managed from a positive perspective, and it’s important to remember that faster is not always better. Here are 9 tips for managing change amid continuous improvement:

Alignment of the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO) with the Preventive Controls for Human Food rule (PCHF) under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) sounds like a giant bowl of alphabet soup once you get all the letters into the mix. The upshot of all these acronyms coming together is an awesome opportunity for dairy food safety professionals to roll up their sleeves and turn their programs from plain old soup to the cream of the crop.

1,700 attendees and nearly 200 exhibitors converged on suburban Chicago’s Stevens Convention Center May 8–11 for the 2017 Food Safety Summit. Alchemy participated in force, meeting with fellow food safety advocates to emphasize the need for food companies to provide their employees with the knowledge and confidence to take smart action and prevent food safety incidents.

Although publicity around food safety incidents sometimes seems to show the food industry in a bad light, the ongoing prominence of food safety in the national news should be viewed positively by food processors if for no other reason than this: our employees—including our frontline food workers—pay attention to the news, too.

Navigating the grocery store aisles when you or a family member suffers from a food allergy can be a daunting task. Having to read the ingredient statement on every product you put in your basket when you shop takes an extraordinarily patient effort. No running in quickly to pick up a few things. You must be diligent in checking every ingredient every time you make a purchase.

When new hires walk through the door, you want them on the plant floor as soon as possible. Many food companies have some sort of formal onboarding process, which may or may not include a few days of classroom training, after which they expect new employees to hit the ground running.

Let’s think about this for a minute.

It’s a truism in the food industry that one of the keys to ensuring food safety is a focused, well-trained frontline workforce. And employee training in the food industry generally adheres to the following model: workers receive classroom instruction via slide presentation or, if they’re lucky, interactive technology, followed by quizzes or tests to confirm that the desired information has stuck.

About 130 years ago, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus was doing research on human memory, using himself as the primary guinea pig. His experiments proved what many people strongly suspected: that newly learned information is quickly forgotten—sometimes by as much as 90% within a few days or weeks—unless a specific effort is made to revisit the information and refresh the memory.

The American Frozen Foods Institute (AFFI) Logistics Forum provided an opportunity to bring together many different stakeholders that are affected not only by the FSMA Sanitary Transport Rule, but also by the same headwinds that are affecting the entire food industry.  Attendees also had a chance to meet Alison Bodor, the new AFFI President and CEO at the event. The forum shared a wealth of useful information, from legislative topics to case studies, panel discussions, sector summaries by subject matter experts, as well as providing opportunities for networking. To say the least, this conference was value packed.

Labeling changes can keep you awake at night—literally. Whether it’s an update to a company logo or a minor change to an ingredient statement, changing labels will raise your stress level. Using labels out of sequence, obsolete labels, or just plain wrong labels can be costly. Labeling mistakes will take a chunk out of your bottom line, lead to loss of customer and consumer confidence, or trigger a recall.  

Recently, the FDA published a large change to the requirements for nutritional labeling that is now open for comment. A change like this will affect every package that currently has a nutritional panel. Although it may seem like this change is off in the distant future, it’s never too soon to start preparing for a change of this magnitude. Survival requires a keen awareness of common pitfalls so you can come out on the other end unscathed.

Organic labeling claims are a great way to market your products' unique attributes and value. But claims that misrepresent the product or fail to live up to the consumer's expectations  will not result in repeat sales or customer loyalty.  When making such a claim, be sure all support for the claim is accurate, science based, supported, and verified.*

If you are having your retail food product certified organic, you’ll want to decide which level of organic certification your product will quality for and determine what your marketing/quality goals are.

There are four options for organic claims — two of them may use the USDA Organic Seal on their packaging, and two of them may not.