Food Protection Trends - July/August 2018 - 266

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE
Food Protection Trends, Vol 38, No. 4, p. 266-283
Copyright© 2018, International Association for Food Protection
6200 Aurora Ave., Suite 200W, Des Moines, IA 50322-2864

Robson A. M. Machado1* and Catherine N. Cutter1
Dept. of Food Science, 202 Rodney A. Erickson Food Science Building,
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Training Hard-to-Reach Pennsylvanian Cheesemakers
about Food Safety, Using a Low-tech Training Tool
ABSTRACT
Consumers' interests in local foods have helped directto-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 posttests 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.

*Author for correspondence: (currently affiliated with The University of Maine) Phone: +1 207.581.3144; Fax: +1 207.581.1636; Email: robson.machado@maine.edu

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