Fight for Food Safety
Perhaps the most dangerous words in food safety: ‘We’ve always done it this way’
Unquestioned operational assumptions can pose food safety risk.
In many meat and poultry facilities, some of the greatest food safety risks are not the problems management knows about. They are the assumptions nobody has questioned in years.
Most companies do not wake up one morning and intentionally create unsafe practices. More often, operational drift happens gradually and quietly over time. A sanitation step gets shortened during a labor shortage. A temporary production adjustment made during COVID, for example, becomes permanent. An environmental swab location remains on the sampling map long after equipment layouts and traffic patterns have changed. An SOP written a decade ago continues to be followed precisely, even though the operation itself has evolved significantly.
Eventually, nobody remembers why certain things are being done a particular way. They simply continue because “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Ironically, mature food safety systems can sometimes be especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. In facilities with experienced teams and longstanding programs, routines become deeply ingrained. Institutional knowledge develops. Employees know the process so well that practices become automatic. In many respects, that operational consistency is a tremendous strength. But over time, familiarity can also reduce curiosity.
That is where risk begins to develop.
Some of the most dangerous words in food safety are “We’ve Always Done It This Way,” if the most vulnerable areas in a food safety system are the controls everyone stopped questioning years ago. Perhaps, a sanitation sequence made perfect sense when a line was installed fifteen years ago, but no longer reflects current production realities. Maybe, a corrective action procedure was created for a specific historical issue, yet continued indefinitely without reevaluation. Sometimes, facilities inherit environmental monitoring sites, maintenance practices, traffic flows, or production scheduling assumptions from prior managers without ever reassessing whether those controls still meaningfully reduce risk.
Importantly, this is not usually a story about employees failing to follow procedures. In many cases, employees are following procedures exactly as written. The deeper question is whether the procedures themselves still reflect operational reality.
The food industry has changed dramatically over the past several years. Facilities have experienced labor shortages, automation changes, supply chain disruptions, new customer demands, evolving regulatory expectations, and increasing production pressures. Yet many internal programs were built around assumptions that existed long before those operational changes occurred.
Strong food safety cultures recognize that continuous improvement requires more than adding new policies or increasing documentation. It also requires periodically revisiting old assumptions. Why is this swab site sampled? Why is this production sequence followed? Why is this sanitation step performed this way? Does this control still meaningfully address today’s actual risks?
Those questions are not signs of disrespect toward prior management or legacy systems. They are signs of a healthy and evolving food safety culture.
The best facilities are not necessarily the ones with the thickest binders or the oldest programs. Often, they are the facilities willing to critically examine their own routines before regulators, customers, or plaintiffs’ attorneys do it for them. In modern food safety management, one of the most valuable words in the plant may no longer be “compliance.” It may simply be: “Why?”
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