By Kevin Meyer
A couple weeks ago I contrasted the process of kaizen (small incremental change) versus kaikaku (large step change), particularly in regards to our current health care reform train wreck. What would have happened if reform was tackled as a series of smaller improvements instead of trying the hail mary?
I had a similar thought while reading an article in USA Today that discussed problems with food safety in public schools. A decade or more ago the government decided standards needed to be improved as the immune systems of children are still developing and were therefore more sensitive to infections.
It has been a decade since the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided that the ground beef it buys for school lunches must meet higher safety standards than ground beef sold to the general public.
Makes sense. But what happened?
But those rules, which required that school lunch meat be rejected if it contains certain pathogens, such as salmonella, have fallen behind the standards that fast-food chains and other businesses are adopting on their own.
Moreover, the special protections that the USDA sets for the ground beef it sends to schools do not extend to other products the federal government — or schools themselves — purchase for student meals. No extra testing is required for the spinach, the peanuts or the tortillas served in schools and, sometimes, those products present similar health risks.
The mandate, similar to the kaikaku of my previous post, created a step change. A good one in this case... but it remained a stationary change. Meanwhile businesses in the market-driven economy realized they needed to continually improve to protect their business and their customers.
What lessons could the National School Lunch Program learn from the industries, companies and universities that have pioneered breakthroughs in food safety? Among those cited by experts:
It is possible to produce safer food by raising standards without breaking the bank.
Pioneers such as McDonald's.
Confounded by the discovery, McDonald's hired one of the nation's best-known food safety scientists, Michael Doyle, and told him, he recalls, "to bulletproof their system so E. coli never happened to them again."
McDonald's reconsidered its old assumptions about food — from how often beef-processing plants should test ground beef to how well a hamburger must be cooked to kill off pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella.
The results helped change the industry. For years, the federal food code said burgers had to be cooked only until their internal temperature reached 140 degrees; McDonald's tests showed the safe standard was 155 degrees and that the meat must register that temperature for at least 15 seconds.
Microbial data also altered the demands McDonald's imposed on its suppliers. After a couple of years, the company saw that "about 5% of the suppliers could not get down to what we considered a reasonable level for salmonella and E. coli," says Doyle, now director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety. "McDonald's worked hard with them, but they couldn't get there, so McDonald's let them go."
The standards have worked, by all accounts. Seattle-based food safety lawyer Bill Marler, who has been involved in almost all the major food safety lawsuits of the past 15 years, says he hasn't sued McDonald's since 1994 for a company-based E. coli illness and can't think of anyone else who has.
Sorry about the long quote, but that's a great story of improvement.
Improving food safety represented a value from the perspective of the customer, and McDonald's created a competitive advantage by recognizing that value. Once again, profit, quality, and a valuable service all wrapped into one. And an improvement in knowledge and technology shared with the industry and public to boot!
No mandates or tax dollars required.
There's another interesting angle to this story, slightly off topic, but still worth mentioning. Congress is once again looking at improving school food safety, but this time aiming to hitch their ride to the businesses that have long surpassed their prior mandates.
She [Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.] and a House counterpart, Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., also are pressing the USDA to stop using school lunch suppliers with poor safety records — and to set standards for school lunch food that mirror those used by fast-food chains and other discriminating companies.
The school lunch program could become the standard-bearer for food safety, says Carol Tucker-Foreman, who oversaw school lunch purchases as assistant undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Carter administration. She says that instead of buying the cheapest possible food for schoolchildren, as it does now, the government could seek out suppliers that meet high standards.
No longer buying the cheapest possible food? So is there finally a recognition that value is not always determined by price, or even cost? Halleluja! I wonder if those same politicians will remember this concept when looking at other programs.