Facility audits present a cross section of how manufacturers are performing against their food safety programs, but Bonna Cannon, president, owner and principal consultant of Bonnafide LLC, warns they don’t provide the whole picture.

Audit readiness – and even earning top scores – may not be enough to ensure the facility has a strong, persistent culture of food safety.

“Because I spend so much time talking about what's broken in food manufacturing, we tend at times to forget what the destination is,” Cannon recently told EIC Alyse Thompson-Richards in a podcast. “The destination that we're on is not to get a high audit score. The goal is to really run a facility and design a facility so well, operate it so well, and make sure that it is so genuinely sound in its culture that when an auditor walks in, it feels like somebody just stopping by with a measuring tape to take a snapshot of how you're doing.”