The next time you’re grocery shopping or eating out, be thankful for checklists.

The food industry, like most industries, uses checklists to ensure safety—in this case, the safety of the food you eat.

But are food producers, retailers, and restaurants using checklists as much as they should? The answer is no, according to a July blog by Dan Flynn for Food Safety News.

As an example, Flynn cites an industry insider who says that uncorrected human error is the reason that allergens have by far been the leading cause of food recalls over the past few years. Product is going out with the wrong label because when a labeling mistake is made, there is no checklist to catch it before shipping.

There is ample technology to help with food safety, Flynn argues, but checklists are “the head of the spear” in using this technology to prevent food poisoning.

“If food safety is really going to improve, government and industry agree it requires making far fewer mistakes, and that means using paper or electronic checklists, probably lots of them,” the blog concludes.

Flynn uses aviation and medicine as examples of other industries in which checklists are already proving to be critical aides. The 2009 book on the importance of checklists, The Checklist Manifesto, is cited, and its author—Dr. Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon and professor—is praised for his many insights into the vital importance of checklists to counteract memory loss and distraction during surgery.

The Checklist Manifesto was published just before Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which required food industry executives to implement and enforce more-complex safety measures. Because the beauty of checklists is that they break complex tasks into manageable parts, The Checklist Manifesto became a popular read among those executives.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), also understands the value of checklists in the process of ensuring food safety, producing numerous checklists for the industry to use.

It’s an easy-to-appreciate concept: any process that involves multiple tasks that have to be done in the right order at the right time can benefit from the use of a checklist for guidance and assurance. Food industry regulators and business leaders alike realize that.

How about in your industry? Surely there are uses for checklists. Are you taking advantage of those opportunities to minimize mistakes?

Takeaway

Ensuring food safety is but one example of how checklists can prove invaluable in business. It’s not enough to have the knowledge of what needs to be done. You also have to manage that knowledge, and checklists are a simple but very useful tool in that management.

For further reading:

Our review of The Checklist Manifesto.

The full Food Safety News article, “Food Safety Checklists Take Their Place Alongside Those Used in Aviation and Medicine.”

_{Image courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture; Creative Commons.}