Training Hard-to-Reach Pennsylvanian Cheesemakers about Food Safety, Using a Low-tech Training Tool

Consumers’ interests in local foods have helped direct- to-consumer marketing, such as farmers’ markets or on-farm sales, to soar in the United States in the past several decades. With the increase in sales and economic importance of this sector, public health agencies and academia have begun to focus on the food safety risks associated with this relatively unregulated side of the food industry. Small-scale dairy farms are one such source of local food. However, little is known about food safety- and sanitation-related knowledge, behavior, attitude, and skills of farmstead cheesemakers in the U.S. Investigating this gap and proposing solutions to close it is important, given that dairy farm and processing environments may be responsible for contamination of raw milk, cheese, and other dairy products with foodborne pathogens. To address these issues, a customized counter-top food safety and sanitation training program for farmstead cheesemakers was developed, disseminated, and evaluated. Seventeen farmstead cheesemakers from across Pennsylvania agreed to participate and were divided randomly into a control group (n = 7; no treatment) and two treatment groups (n = 5 each). To address whether storytelling could affect the outcome of the food safety training, a video vignette was designed and administered to one of the treatment groups. Both treatment groups received a pre-test, followed by the counter-top training, and then a post test three weeks later. Pre- and post- tests addressed food safety knowledge, attitudes, and behavior, as well as an evaluation of handwashing skills. As expected, the counter-top training significantly (P < 0.05) increased participants’ food safety knowledge (by 18%), and handwashing skills also improved (25%), while no change was observed for those attributes in the control group. Unfortunately, changes in food safety attitude and behavior were not observed for either of the treatment groups. Additionally, storytelling with the use of video vignette did not impact any of the attributes studied, although its use was perceived as beneficial by participants. The results demonstrated that a combination of counter-top food safety training with a handwashing activity could result in significant gains in cheesemakers’ food safety knowledge and handwashing skills. The information from this study may provide researchers and/ or regulators with information that can be used to improve the delivery of food safety information to this audience.