Despite decades of research, implementation of the Food and Drug Administration’s Food Code, and millions of dollars invested in food safety training programs, there has not been a significant reduction of foodborne illness outbreaks or food product recalls. Each year, 1 in 6 U.S. citizens gets sick from foodborne illness with 128,000 hospitalizations and approximately 3000 deaths (Scallan, 2011). Many of these outbreaks are caused by post-process contamination and/or poor personal hygiene.  Post-process contamination can occur as the result of ineffective or inadequate cleaning and disinfection (Reij and Den Aantrekker, 2004). Poor personal hygiene can unintentionally spread disease to other workers and customers, as well as food products and food contact surfaces.       

Quality assurance and food safety managers rely on Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOPs) and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) to help produce safe foods. These systems are essential to insuring safe food manufacturing and enables managers to correct errors that may occur during production (Neal et al, 2014; Reij and Den Aantrekker, 2004). The next key step in providing safe food is training all hourly employees. Unfortunately, this may have many challenges, particularly for the protein industry, such as low initial work skills, language barriers, cultural differences, the volume of employees and high turnover.