In world history, the Renaissance was a cultural revolution that brought the human race out of the Middle or Dark Ages via enlightenment of the arts, religion, politics and science. The Renaissance brought humanity into the Modern Age and was a true transformation of the way of life.

In the modern business world, three centuries is a bit much to ask — three years, however, is a more realistic timeframe, during which a company might undergo a total transformation — a period of enlightenment that takes that company to the next level.

For Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods, Canada’s largest protein processor, the past three years have brought just that — a renaissance of increased awareness, self-improvement and forward-thinking around food safety that has brought the company back from its own dark days of late 2008, when a listeriosis outbreak that killed 23 people and sickened others in Canada was traced back to its product.

Restoring trust

The 2008 listeriosis outbreak put Maple Leaf Foods squarely in the crosshairs of consumers, who demanded that the company prove itself as a producer of safe, wholesome foods once again — even as Maple Leaf took accountability for its role in the tragedy.

Company president and CEO Michael McCain has been very visible and very open about Maple Leaf Foods’ role in re-establishing this trust, and Maple Leaf has communicated its goals openly with consumers — for example, creating a Food Safety section on its Web site, where visitors can read about the company’s commitment to food safety or ask Randy Huffman, chief food safety officer, a food-safety question.

One tenet of the Maple Leaf’s stated food-safety pledge reflects the mentality of the company:

“We commit to building a strong culture of food safety, with high performance teams, through continuous training, education and communicating results. Our people are encouraged and expected to act on any food safety concern they may have to improve our food safety practices.”

Even with this pledge now being front and center for consumers to view on the Web site, Huffman stresses that the outbreak didn’t change Maple Leaf’s core values.

“These values had been in place [for more than a decade], and only had a slight rewording a couple years ago,” he says. “But essentially, the values are the same, and that served us well in responding to this issue.”

Nor did the outbreak change the company’s thoughts about food safety. It always was a high priority — in fact, Huffman adds, it wasn’t the strategy or even the execution of the food-safety program that led to the recall and outbreak.

“At that time, Maple Leaf had proactively designed a Listeria testing program that was based on what the company believed at the time to be best-practice,” he explains. “And in fact, they were using spreadsheets developed by the AMI Listeria workshop team to collect that data, so the data was being collected above and beyond the requirements.

“It was a documented program that told them what to do when they got a positive,” Huffman continues, “and if the manufacturing leader asked if they’d followed the program, the answer would have been, ‘Yes, we have the program and followed it.’”

Steve Dowbiggin, senior vice president of manufacturing, says a lack of “data interrogation” was the primary cause of the incident.

“The function of verification of the Listeria control program was very much a QA function, and the awareness or knowledge of the repercussions weren’t entrenched in the organization — in manufacturing specifically,” he says. “We had a protocol we felt we were doing right, but … were we asking the third and fourth questions? Not having deep enrichment understanding of what we were really seeing was an issue.”

Once the awareness and understanding was present, the food-safety renaissance at Maple Leaf Foods unfolded.

“We are an organization that, once we become aware of something, we are great ralliers around it,” Dowbiggin says. “The understanding of what we’re measuring from top to bottom is where the journey has started, and we’ve gotten it to where employees are super-engaged in it.”

Creating a foundation of understanding

Motivating Maple Leaf Foods employees to embrace the new level of food-safety understanding is not a difficult task, says Huffman.

“Every one of our customers knows about [the outbreak], so the awareness is extremely high,” he says. “We live with it every day — that’s the one thing that motivates us every day, and there’s not really anything else.”

Dowbiggin agrees passionately with Huffman’s assessment of the motivating factors involved in the transformation of the mentality at Maple Leaf Foods.

“We are very overt to ourselves that we killed 23 people,” Dowbiggin explains. “We took personal accountability for that, and it’s tough, but our people are engaged in solving that, and not letting it happen again.”

One way in which employees are engaged are the Food Safety Foundations courses that Maple Leaf Foods hosts in conjunction with the University of Guelph — an education and training program that creates a common language around food safety within the organization.

“At the heart of it, it’s people and culture, and having these values to lean on as an organization, as well as having the support to do what we want to do,” Huffman says. “Everybody understands the values, they live by them and support everything related to food safety in my mind.”

With the support of McCain, whom Huffman calls “unique” among top executives in terms of his food-safety knowledge, Maple Leaf Foods uses the Food Safety Foundations to reinforce the values and help all understand and become engaged in the food-safety processes and the ramifications of being lax in committing to food safety.

Huffman relays that the company has more than 600 senior leaders at the company — from all departments and all facilities — who have participated or will participate in the three-day Foundations course. The course powerfully reminds employees of Maple Leaf’s own incident, and then proceeds to walk them through risk-assessment, risk-management, and risk-communication. The course uses real-life case-studies with Maple Leaf products to communicate the systems, protocols and verification-testing that the company uses.

Senior leaders who attend the Foundations course return to their facilities and are expected to host their own course for their local salaried staff members. Finally, Huffman says, Maple Leaf plans to train hourly employees via Alchemy’s SISTEM training program.

Training of new hires and re-training/refresher courses are expected to keep the courses active in the future.

Rallying the troops

When Dowbiggin says Maple Leaf employees rally around an initiative, it stands to reason that buy-in would come quickly and easily for the senior management team. Sharon K.K. Beals, senior vice president of food safety & quality assurance, got a glimpse of the culture and buy-in during the job interview for her current position — stating that the human-resources department was very open and up front with her about the deadly 2008 outbreak.

During The National Provisioner’s visit to Maple Leaf Foods’ Bartor Road and Courtneypark processing plants in early June 2011, employees were seen taking individual initiative in following sanitation protocols — for instance, line workers wiping down equipment surfaces during downtime, such as during label changeovers (see photo on page 24), or designated sanitation employees removing waste product from floors (as opposed to line workers).

Huffman tells a story of when he realized that employees were absorbing the information and buying into the food-safety program. A few years ago, Huffman toured one of Maple Leaf’s larger processing facilities, and while on the tour, he was curious about the ingredients in a high-moisture pepperoni product the facility was manufacturing.

Huffman says he picked up a label from the stack at the back end of the packaging line, read the ingredients list and put the label back on the stack when his curiosity was satisfied.

“Shortly thereafter, the woman who was loading the packaging machine tracked me down and basically read me the riot act, saying, ‘You came into my product zone and did not follow the SOP. You took that label and then put it back on the stack with your bare hands,’” Huffman explains. “It was impressive that she actually took time out of her break to come find us on our tour, and [tell me] I shouldn’t have done that.

“That’s when I realized, ‘People are paying close attention to all this, and that’s really good.’”

In Huffman’s view, getting buy-in is nothing groundbreaking at Maple Leaf — just another example of everyone at the company, from top to bottom, being involved.

“It’s a team sport, as [Beals] has said before, and that really is what has driven the change,” he says. “I don’t think anybody feels as though they’re on their own, and everybody’s pulling in the same direction. That’s made it successful.”

Beals believes employees embraced the new approach based on town hall-type visits by executive leadership to each facility. It showed commitment from the top down.

“It was the fact that the mountain came to Mohammed, as opposed to us sitting here in the ivory tower,” she explains. “When the corporate guys take it out and really look for the input and feedback, it works. We had some really good insight from some of the folks in those town halls.”

Moving forward, Dowbiggin concludes, Maple Leaf Foods expects its top-to-bottom awareness and commitment to make it a global leader in food safety. He says it’s terrible that the company’s wakeup call had to come in the form of a deadly outbreak, but it’s a consequence that now carries tremendous weight within the walls of the organization.

“[We’re] very aware of it. Every day. And people don’t want it to happen — ever again.”