Food Safety Culture : Creating a Behavior Based Food Safety Management System Food safety awareness is at an all time high new and emerging threats to the food supply are being recognized and consumers are eating more and more meals prepared outside of the home. Accordingly retail and foodservice establishments as well as food producers at all levels of the food production chain have a growing responsibility to ensure that proper food safety and sanitation practices are followed thereby safeguarding the health of their guests and customers.Achieving food safety success in this changing environment requires going beyond traditional training testing and inspectional approaches to managing risks. It requires a better understanding of organizational culture and the human dimensions of food safety. To improve the food safety performance of a retail or foodservice establishment an organization with thousands of employees or a local community you must change the way people do things. You must change their behavior. In fact simply put food safety equals behavior. When viewed from these lenses one of the most common contributing causes of food borne disease is unsafe behavior (such as improper hand washing cross contamination or undercooking food). Thus to improve food safety we need to better integrate food science with behavioral science and use a systems based approach to managing food safety risk.The importance of organizational culture human behavior and systems thinking is well documented in the occupational safety and health fields. However significant contributions to the scientific literature on these topics are noticeably absent in the field of food safety.