Expanding the Food-Safety Dialogue

Jack in the Box's safety expert seeks to bring all segments of the food chain together

By Scott Hume, Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 4/1/2003

Up to now, individual groups—quick-service and full-service restaurants, the meat and produce industries—have largely worked [on food safety] in their own areas, and they have made significant progress,” says David Theno. “The hope is both that everyone will adopt best practices in their areas and also that we form links with those to each side of us to create a safer overall food system.”

Theno, senior vice president of quality and product safety for San Diego-based Jack in the Box Inc., hopes to play a role in creating such linkages now that he has been appointed to the newly formed advisory board for the Partnership for Food Safety Education. The Washington, D.C.-based organization brings together business sectors and more than 500 national, state and local organizations to address their shared commitments to producing and serving safer food.

Those constituencies “haven’t been working at cross purposes, necessarily, but often there have been competing priorities and needs,” Theno says. “If you’re running a retail grocery chain, your needs might be different than mine at a QSR. It’s not a question of better or worse goals, but you may be talking one way and I’m talking another. Bringing everyone together, we can find ways both of us could compromise. That helps a manufacturer be more efficient [by having common standards] and everyone does better.”

HACCP’s CENTRAL ROLE
Jack in the Box has been an industry leader in raising and implementing safety standards. In 1994 it was the first restaurant operator to put a systemwide Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) system in place.

“Until then, HACCP really had been a check list and an additional duty. We showed that the tool works to manage food safety in a quick-service restaurant and that it can be fully integrated into the daily management of the operation,” says Theno. “I think it was a case where someone had to be the first to demonstrate how effective it is so that everyone else could say, ‘Well, that’s what we’re going to do, then.’”

HACCP principles must be integral to a restaurant’s day-to-day operations and their effectiveness tied to unit management’s compensation, Theno says. That’s when food safety is taken seriously.

Jack in the Box’s other critical initiative has been in working with its suppliers on microbial standards to eliminate pathogens not just in ground beef but in all foods. “Lots of people told us: ‘Manufacturers will never do these things. You can ask but they won’t do it.’ But they did. The other excuse was that it would be too expensive. I think we’ve proved not only that it’s effective to partner with suppliers to do it, but also that it’s not free but not cost-prohibitive either.

“I tell people that food safety is the one place where you’re betting your business. Can you afford to do it? Well, can you afford not to?”