Frank Yiannas – Food Safety Culture Guru – will be back in 2025 by popular demand

Reports of Frank Yiannas’s food safety culture workshop in Auckland, 26 & 27 August, are glowing – “fun, interactive, and truly stimulating”. If you missed it, the good news is that NZFSSRC has asked him back to deliver another workshop, probably in May 2025. 

Frank had a wealth of case studies to illustrate what happens when leaders fail to create a culture conducive to good communication and good behaviour. It is the common cause, says Frank, behind not just food poisoning fatalities, like Jack in a Box and Maple Leaf Foods, but other safety disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Space Shuttle Columbia. 

His run through the mega trends was particularly interesting. He talked about a new phenomenon called ‘Infodemiology’, where AI is used to learn at a much earlier stage about disease outbreaks by scanning search engine entries, social media and restaurant reviews. People might not end up going to the doctor and submitting a sample, but they will complain to their friends the next morning about spending the early hours over the toilet bowl and ask if they were similarly afflicted.  

Frank says that despite all the efforts going into improving food safety, the numbers globally are flat lining. In New Zealand, 200,000 people are reportedly made sick each year by food, and that is surely the tip of the iceberg. In the US where Frank lives, “Unsafe, mislabelled, and contaminated foods cause an estimated 76 million illnesses each year, including 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.” 

Frank quoted Einstein ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' So, what can food producers do differently? Working on food safety culture is one of those things. At the end of the two-day workshop, Frank asked participants how they would apply their new knowledge and was met with a plethora of answers. Some planned to update signage in the production plant or to revise their organisation’s induction videos, ensuring new employees grasp food safety from day one. Others committed to broader changes, like engaging executives in safety discussions, refining risk assessments, or implementing reward systems to reinforce positive behaviour. Each response reflected a strong intent to apply key principles from the workshop, such as explaining “the why” behind actions and leveraging the power of commitment to drive a lasting food safety culture.