Why is it that frontline food-safety steps still get skipped, even when teams are aware of the rules?
This is a question I explore often, and it’s exactly what I discussed during October’s FSMA Friday webinar. I joined the session to share how applying principles of behavioral science, specifically nudges, habit formation, and peer influence, can meaningfully strengthen food-safety performance on the plant floor.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the key ideas from that discussion, including:
- why these behavioral gaps persist even in well-trained teams,
- how small shifts in environment and culture can change everyday actions,
- and what practical steps food and beverage manufacturers can take right now to reinforce safer, more consistent behaviors.
You’ll learn how to design strategic nudges, build habits that stick, activate peer accountability, and use digital tools to sustain the changes over time.
Why Behavioral Gaps Persist
Even in facilities with strong training programs and clearly defined food-safety protocols, we still see gaps between what people know and what they actually do on the floor. Traditional training and compliance systems often assume that information alone will drive consistent behavior, but in practice, that’s rarely the case.
Checklist Fatigue
When frontline workers are completing the same forms and following the same steps day after day, the activity can become automatic, sometimes to the point where critical details get overlooked.
Paper-Based Systems
Add in paper-based systems, and it becomes even harder. Paper creates friction, slows down feedback, and often fails to provide timely reminders or cues that help reinforce the right action at the right moment.
Human Behavior
But the biggest gap is something many food-safety programs unintentionally overlook: human behavior itself. People don’t always act in perfectly rational ways. They get tired, distracted, rushed, or influenced by what coworkers around them are doing. Unless we design systems that account for these realities, even well-trained, well-intentioned employees will occasionally skip steps.
How Small Shifts Can Change Everyday Action
This is where behavioral science becomes incredibly valuable. Concepts like nudges, habit formation, and peer influence offer practical tools for shaping real-world actions.
- Nudges: Small changes to the environment or workflow have been consistently shown in research to improve decision-making and increase compliance across many industries. In food safety, even something as simple as repositioning a handwashing station or adding a visual cue at the point of use can dramatically increase the likelihood that the right step happens at the right time.
- Habit Formation: Many frontline food-safety actions, like handwashing, gowning, or logging sanitation steps, are repetitive by nature, which makes them ideal candidates for habit-building. When a behavior becomes automatic, it requires far less mental effort and is less likely to be skipped under pressure. Behavioral science shows that habits form most effectively when they’re paired with consistent cues and immediate reinforcement. By embedding food-safety actions into existing routines, we can make compliance the default rather than the exception.
- Peer Influence: Humans are social creatures, and the behavior of one team member often sets the tone for others. In manufacturing environments, people look to their peers to determine what’s normal and expected. Positive peer pressure can be a powerful force, like when teams see each other consistently following protocols, recognizing good behaviors, or tracking shared performance metrics, compliance naturally increases. Peer influence turns food safety from an individual responsibility into a collective one.
When you look at the pace and complexity of a typical food or beverage facility with multiple tasks happening simultaneously, tight production schedules, constant handoffs, and significant compliance pressures, it’s easy to see why following every step perfectly, every time, is difficult. Behavioral science helps bridge that gap by meeting employees where they are and reinforcing the choices we need them to make, even in a fast-moving environment.
Practical Steps You Can Take Right Now
Behavior change can feel abstract, but it doesn’t have to be. When we break it down into manageable steps, it becomes a practical roadmap any food or beverage manufacturer can follow. Here’s how:
1. Assessment: Map Out Key Frontline Behaviors
Begin by identifying the specific food-safety behaviors that matter most for your operation, such as hand-washing, gowning, sanitation steps, line checks, equipment pre-op inspections, and so on. Look closely at where gaps tend to appear. Are steps skipped during shift changes? Do certain tasks get rushed during high-volume periods? This assessment gives you a clear picture of where behavioral interventions can have the biggest impact.
2. Design Nudges and Habit-Building Interventions
Next, apply a framework like COM-B—Capability, Opportunity, Motivation—to understand why those gaps occur.
- Do employees need clearer instructions or more hands-on practice (Capability)?
- Are tools and cues easily accessible at the moment the action needs to occur (Opportunity)?
- Is the behavior reinforced and recognized by leaders and peers (Motivation)?
Use what you learn to design nudges (such as visual cues or workflow adjustments) and habit-building strategies (like pairing required behaviors with consistent triggers).
3. Deploy Tools and Communications
Once your interventions are designed, integrate them into daily operations. This might include:
- Updated signage at points of use
- Mobile or digital checklists that guide the sequence of actions
- Peer dashboards that show progress in real time
- Short training refreshers or shift huddles that reinforce expectations
The goal is to align your tools and communications so they consistently cue and support the right behaviors.
4. Pilot and Iterate
Start small. Choose one production line, one shift, or one department, and run your interventions for 4–6 weeks. During this period, gather data and feedback on what worked? What didn’t? Were certain nudges more effective than others? Piloting gives you a safe space to test, refine, and adapt before rolling changes out plantwide.
5. Roll Out and Scale
Once you’ve validated what works, begin expanding the changes across your facility, or multiple facilities. As you scale, it’s crucial to maintain consistency in how behaviors are cued, monitored, and recognized. Reinforce habit cues and continue celebrating peer-driven wins to keep momentum strong.
6. Sustain and Evolve
Behavior change isn’t a “set it and forget it” process. Over time, behaviors can drift, especially in high-pressure environments. Continue monitoring your metrics, refreshing visual cues, and updating digital dashboards so they stay relevant and meaningful. Recognize teams and individuals who consistently model the right behaviors. Sustained reinforcement is what ultimately turns new actions into long-term habits.
Turning Insight Into Lasting Food-Safety Culture
At the end of the day, food safety isn’t just a set of rules, it’s a set of behaviors. And those behaviors are shaped by the environment we create, the habits we reinforce, and the culture our teams carry forward every day. Behavioral science gives us a powerful lens for understanding why gaps happen in the first place and, more importantly, how to close them in a way that’s both practical and sustainable.
If you’d like to dive deeper into these concepts, explore real examples, or hear the full conversation, I invite you to watch the replay of our FSMA Friday webinar. It’s a great way to see how these ideas come to life within actual food and beverage operations.
Watch the full webinar replay below:
As you continue strengthening your food-safety culture, remember: sustained behavior change isn’t about doing everything at once. It’s about making small, intentional adjustments that support your teams in doing the right thing, even on the busiest days.
