Here’s a video message from one of your fellow BAC Fighters:
Trasca Mason is an Environmental Health Specialist from McDonough, Georgia. She reaches about 6,700 people a year with food safety messages. Of those 6,700 people, 90% say they will provide more food safety training for children and parents. Trasca stays motivated because she knows her food safety education work saves lives. Excellent work, Trasca. Keep on Fighting BAC! ®
The Partnership for Food Safety Education worked with contributing partner Kroger to create a week- by- week Food Safety Education Month outreach plan. We thank every participating Kroger Co. store for connecting with customers on this important topic!
Kroger’s 220 Southwest stores were excited to participate in National Food Safety Education Month Activities! Here is just a sampling of what they did to help make sure consumers took home food safety messages:
Customers were happy to learn something extra about food safety when they came in to do their shopping. Thank you Kroger Co. Southwest for all of these great efforts!
The Partnership for Food Safety Education worked with contributing partner Kroger to create a week- by- week Food Safety Education Month outreach plan. We thank every participating Kroger Co. store for connecting with customers on this important topic!
Shana Davis, Food Safety Manager for Kroger’s Nashville division caught up with us to talk about how she encouraged a little healthy competition among store managers to boost food safety education month customer engagement in their 89 Nashville area stores.
Each store was instructed to set up a food safety booth in-store and stock it with the Partnership’s s Home Food Safety Mythbusters flyers. Store co-managers were on location to engage with customers and answer questions based on the Mythbusters information. To encourage managers to engage, Shana set up a “best-booth” competition. The districts shared their booth pictures on the private social networking site, Yammer, for a chance to win a prize.
If you are a BAC Fighter you might recall our contest last summer to find America’s Top BAC Fighter!
Well, are you ready to meet him? America’s Top BAC Fighter is Trevor Daneker (featured above) and he works at the Rhode Island Community Food Bank! Trevor teaches a class called Community Cooking for pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens around Rhode Island. The program focuses on teaching food safety, nutrition, and eating healthy on a budget. Congratulations on winning our grand prize, Trevor!
Pregnant women are ten times more likely to get an infection from Listeria monocytogenes and pregnant Hispanic women are about 24 times more likely to be affected. Listeriosis is a serious illness that can lead to meningitis, hospitalization, fetal loss and death.
A recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that there has been little or no progress in reducing the annual incidence of Listeriosis infections in more than decade.
The food safety team at Publix recognized that Listeriosis was a critical concern for the families the company serves. Michael Roberson, Director of Corporate Quality Assurance for Publix Super Markets and his team of food safety experts partnered with their creative marketing associates at Publix to develop a Listeria Initiative with a goal to develop a temperature control solution that would reach a large population of Publix’s Hispanic customers.
Publix came up with a creative way to communicate with Hispanic households about the importance of monitoring refrigerator temperatures. Helping customers maintain home refrigerators at or below 40°F is an especially important home food safety practice when it comes to Listeria prevention, since the bacteria can continue to grow at cold temperatures.
The team at Publix then partnered with an outside design group and asked them to design a temperature monitor sticker that was then applied to the front page of newspapers and distributed to current and potential customers. The temperature monitor stickers could be easily removed from the newspaper and placed inside the refrigerator to monitor temperatures. Special ink used in the stickers would turn dark to indicate the refrigerator was at the correct temperature, and the ink would stay invisible when the refrigerator was not at the optimum cooling temperature.
“We all know food safety is a shared responsibility. Over the past few years, our food safety team at Publix has partnered with the food industry to continually raise the bar and address key food safety issues such as the risk of Listeria. Moreover, a key point of our mission statement at Publix is to be involved as a responsibility citizen in our communities. The development of this temperature device was no simple task. We have some talented associates with our Marketing team that are extremely creative. They were terrific to work with, and I believe we developed an unique approach that helps our customers maintain food safety within their home kitchens.” – Michael Roberson, Director of Corporate Quality Assurance, Publix Super Markets