New SQF Edition 10 Changes Raise the Bar on Food Safety Culture

Your SQF practitioner has been running on fumes for weeks: fine-tuning every detail, closing every gap, making sure the organization is ready for what is coming. The audit window just opened, and after weeks of that grind, their body gives out. Severe cold. Home sick. Not optional.

As luck would have it, the auditor walks in today.

The question in that moment is not whether the binder is current or the training records are complete. It is whether your food safety culture can hold without the person whose presence, follow-through and relentless attention kept everything connected.

Will the system hold when the glue is temporarily gone, or will the seams start to show within the first hour? Most organizations will scramble. People will step up, but it will feel exactly like what it is: a team reaching for something they were not fully prepared to carry. There will be anxiety, gaps in who knows what and a version of the low-grade panic that comes from being handed a situation you rehearsed only in theory.

That experience is more common than most organizations want to admit, and it is precisely the gap that SQF Edition 10 is now designed to surface.

Released March 1, with audits beginning Jan. 2, 2027, SQF Edition 10 changes establish formal audit criteria around food safety culture for the first time, making it observable, assessable and something organizations are now accountable to demonstrate. Culture moves from a background expectation to a scored requirement, and that shift changes both what food safety professionals need to build and what organizations need to measure.

The Standard Finally Caught Up to What We Already Knew.

For years, compliance meant signed policies, completed training matrices and documented procedures. Edition 10 moves the bar. Auditors will look for active modeling, promotion and reinforcement of food safety culture across the entire organization — not just the food safety team.

That includes engineering, brand marketing, operations, supply chain, R&D and every other function whose daily decisions either reinforce food safety culture or quietly erode it.

Edition 10 audits begin in January, which makes this a meaningful window. Organizations that use it to close leadership culture gaps will walk into that first audit with something real to show. Those that treat it as another documentation exercise will be left explaining the gap between what their binder says and what people actually do.

What Your Auditor Is Actually Watching.

The audit does not start when the auditor walks through the door. It starts weeks earlier, in how your team responded to last year’s nonconformances, in whether corrective actions were closed thoughtfully or checked off quickly and in the quality of preparation and communication leading up to the visit. By the time an auditor steps onto your floor, they already have a picture forming. What they observe in person either confirms it or challenges it.

Brian Shelton, the 2026 SQF Auditor Excellence Award recipient, described what he watches from the moment he arrives.

“Facilities with strong food safety cultures typically demonstrate collaboration, transparency and preparedness without appearing rehearsed,” he said. “Those early observations often tell me more than any policy manual.”

He is watching whether departments work together naturally, information flows without hesitation and employees seem comfortable because audits are part of how the business operates, not something to brace for.

Most food safety professionals have seen an employee recite a CCP response on autopilot, hitting every required answer, moving through the steps mechanically, landing on all the right words. It sounds compliant. But there is a difference between an employee who has memorized what to say and one who actually understands the system they are working inside. Shelton uses a scenario that gets straight to that difference.

“If I ask what they would do if a plastic pallet broke near exposed product, organizations with mature food safety cultures often provide detailed, step-by-step responses,” he said. “They understand containment, product evaluation, notification requirements and documentation. In weaker cultures, the answer is often limited to: ‘I would tell my supervisor.’”

Educators will recognize what Shelton is describing. Bloom’s Taxonomy draws a line between memorization and application — between reciting the right answer and reasoning through an unexpected situation. Edition 10 is asking organizations to develop teams that can operate at that higher level. Not just teams that can answer the questions they practiced for, but teams that can think clearly when something goes sideways on a Tuesday afternoon.

Dina Scott, a certified SQF auditor, described what she is watching in a different way.

“Strong food safety culture is visible in the small, unpolished, unscripted moments, not in the binder on the conference room table,” she said.

Maggie Smith, also an SQF consultant, brings in the dimension that is easiest to overlook in a compliance-focused conversation. She is watching for relationships.

“I want to see that employees are not afraid of management being on the floor, that they make eye contact, that management can call a majority of employees by name and ask about a personal aspect of their lives,” Smith said.

The quality of those relationships, she observed, tells you more about the real culture of an organization than almost anything else visible in an audit room. Food safety culture is not something you demonstrate for an auditor. It is something an auditor observes, whether you are ready or not.

Why Your Culture Survey Is Only Telling You Half the Story.

Most food companies have done the work: culture surveys, training programs, improvement plans with action items, owners and timelines. And it helped. Scores moved, engagement picked up, the audit went better than the year before. Then it plateaued.

That plateau is almost always a measurement problem, and it starts with how the industry has been defining culture.

There is a phrase repeated constantly in food safety circles: “Culture is what people do when no one is watching.” But behavior that depends on observation, or the absence of it, is not culture. It is compliance waiting to slip. If the goal is getting people to behave correctly only when they think they might be caught, the organization has built a performance, not a culture.

Real culture is more durable and honest than that. It is who we are, what we stand for and whether people across the organization actually demonstrate that every day, in every function, at every level.

Smith put it plainly: “Culture is not what a person is doing when no one is watching. Culture is the atmosphere that makes people want to do the right thing whether anyone is watching or not. Culture is the effect of management’s actions.”

That last sentence is worth sitting with. Culture is downstream of leadership behavior, not upstream of it. This means if you want to change culture, you have to change leadership behavior first.

That reframe matters for measurement. If culture is an atmosphere built over time through consistent leadership behavior, then a survey taken once a year will never capture it accurately. Surveys are a lagging indicator, a reflection of what the culture has already been, not a reliable picture of where it is headed.

Emily Wagner, the 2026 SQF Practitioner Excellence Award recipient, described the indicator she trusts most.

“The biggest sign to me that culture is real is when people speak up before QA ever gets involved,” she said. “Some of the moments that stick with me most are when an operator, line employee, sanitation team member or supervisor stops and says, ‘Something doesn’t seem right,’ even when nobody is watching and it would be easier to ignore it. You cannot fake those moments.”

Those moments are not produced by a survey or a training program. They are produced by a culture where speaking up has been consistently safe, valued and worth the effort.

Wagner added an indicator that often goes unnoticed in culture conversations: “If you are repeatedly seeing a food safety or quality issue on one shift but not others, there’s a good chance the culture on that shift is different, not that the risk only exists during those hours. In my experience, culture gaps usually show up before system gaps do.”

Katie McKewen, an SQF Practitioner Excellence nominee and quality and compliance manager, watches similar signals.

“If documented processes are still being followed on off-shifts and weekends or during busy periods, that’s a strong sign of a healthy culture,” she said. “I also look at whether employees are still speaking up, reporting issues, and taking initiative.”

Off-shifts. Weekends. Busy periods. Those are the moments culture either holds or quietly drifts, and they are the moments no survey will ever capture. The survey caught the symptom. The behavior was the cause.

The Three Culture Gaps That Keep Showing Up.

The obstacles to building real food safety culture are rarely technical. They are human and strikingly consistent across organizations. Three leadership gaps explain why most culture initiatives plateau. None show up cleanly on a checklist. All show up in an audit.

1. The gap between knowing the code and being able to move people.

FSQA teams know the standard. They know HACCP, GFSI requirements and what auditors want to see. What most organizations never deliberately develop is the ability to influence behavior across functions they do not directly manage: operations, supply chain, R&D and maintenance. Those daily decisions often sit furthest from the food safety team’s direct authority.

Shelton named what this looks like from the audit room: “Many organizations unintentionally place the entire SQF system on the shoulders of a small QA team. In reality, SQF and food safety culture only succeed when every department shares ownership.”

That shared ownership does not happen by accident. It has to be built, and building it requires leadership development coaching that goes well beyond technical knowledge.

2. The gap between a strong individual and a real system.

In many organizations, food safety culture lives in a small group of committed people rather than in the organization itself. The rest of the business may know the vocabulary, but it has not yet owned the substance. They can say the right things in a meeting. They defer appropriately when the auditor asks questions. But the culture lives in a small group of exhausted, committed individuals rather than in the organization itself.

Wagner named what finally shifted it in her own organization. “The hardest gap to close was getting food safety to stop feeling like ‘QA’s job,’” she said. “What helped shift that mindset was changing the conversation. Instead of only talking about compliance, we started connecting food safety back to operational benefits. If production teams fully own food safety expectations within their areas, issues are caught faster, corrective actions happen quicker, and there is less downtime waiting on QA involvement.”

The shift she is describing is not a training initiative. It is what happens when leaders across functions start to see food safety as part of their own accountability rather than someone else’s checklist.

3. The gap between knowing and leading.

Most organizations have run culture initiatives that worked for a while. Something moved the needle — a survey, a training program, a new improvement plan — and then leveled off.

McKewen identified what finally broke through the plateau in her organization. “What really moved it along was leadership consistency,” she said. “Once supervisors and managers started reinforcing food safety in everyday situations, it became part of the culture instead of just an audit compliance topic.”

The behavior of supervisors and managers in everyday moments, how they respond under pressure, what they prioritize when production and food safety pull in opposite directions, whether they reinforce the standard when it costs something, moved the needle when nothing else could.

What It Looks Like When Culture Is Actually Working.

Smith described a plant manager she observed over the course of her auditing career, someone who eventually rose to a higher position at another company. At every facility he led, the pattern was the same.

“He spent more time on the floor than he did in his office, and he was still able to get the paperwork completed and participate in calls,” Smith said. “Employees would speak to him before he could speak to them. They called him by name, and he did the same. Employees were known to tell him he would not see them the next day because they had scheduled time off.”

Read that last detail carefully. Employees told him when they would be out, not because policy required it, but because the relationship was real enough that it felt like the natural thing to do. That is not a management technique or a culture program. That is what genuine connection between leaders and their people looks like in practice.

Smith’s definition of what makes it possible is the simplest and most honest one we have encountered in this work: “Culture is connection. Does the management team really care about the employees as individuals?”

Oprah Winfrey once observed that, after thousands of interviews, she found every person wanted to know the same three things: Do you see me, do you hear me, do I matter? Food safety culture that holds is built on exactly that foundation. When people feel seen, heard and valued, doing the right thing stops being a compliance requirement and becomes part of how they identify with their work.

That is what audit-ready food safety culture looks like. Not a perfect binder. Not a flawless survey score. A leadership team that knows their people, shows up for them consistently and has built an environment where food safety is owned by everyone, because everyone understands why it matters.

What to Do Before January 2027.

Preparing for SQF Edition 10 changes requires honest action at every level of the organization, not just from the small group that has been carrying the work.

For supervisors and managers, the question is whether food safety is being reinforced in everyday moments or only when an audit is approaching. What happens when production pressure and a food safety concern arrive at the same time? What happens on the night shift when no one senior is in the building? Those repeated moments, across hundreds of interactions over months and years, are what culture is made of. Leadership development in food manufacturing that focuses only on technical knowledge leaves leaders without the skills to navigate those moments well.

For directors and functional leaders across operations, supply chain, R&D, engineering and other functions, the question is whether they are actively shaping food safety culture as part of their own leadership responsibility or participating when required and deferring to the FSQA team the rest of the time. Are standards current, clearly communicated and genuinely owned across functions? Is hygienic design part of how engineering thinks about every capital purchase, or is it a conversation the food safety team has to initiate after the fact? Is brand marketing building food safety review into the product development process, or is the food safety team perpetually playing catch-up?

For senior leaders and executives, genuine food safety culture at the top goes beyond signing the annual food safety policy. It means having real, working knowledge of what a presumptive positive means for the business, what a mislabeled product triggers operationally and legally and what the actual stakes are when culture fails at scale. Leaders who understand those consequences, not just in compliance terms but in human terms, lead food safety culture differently than leaders who have been briefed on the talking points.

And for the food safety professionals currently carrying this work: The goal is not to carry it better. The goal is to build something that does not require you to carry it alone. That means connecting food safety culture to operational outcomes in language that every function responds to. It means making the case for leadership development not as a culture initiative but as a business strategy, because that is exactly what it is. The organizations best prepared for SQF Edition 10 changes will be those that use the time before January 2027 to build leadership accountability across every function.

After all, culture does not change until leaders do.

Jill Stuber and Tia Glave are co-founders of Catalyst Food Leaders, a coaching-based leadership development firm built exclusively for the food industry. Learn more and download Catalyst’s guide to SQF Edition 10 here.