When Dr. Darin Detwiler talks about red flags in food safety, people listen. A former nuclear engineer turned food policy expert, Detwiler has spent decades investigating how, and why, companies miss the warning signs that precede catastrophe. In a TraceGains webinar, Beyond Recalls: Culture, Communication, and Prevention in Food Safety, he made one thing clear: food safety failures are rarely sudden. They are predictable, visible, and preventable. If you know where to look.
Every recall begins long before a headline. Often, the root cause isn’t a single pathogen or process failure—it’s a cultural one. A weak food safety culture blinds organizations to risk, allowing danger to hide in plain sight.
“Time after time with outbreak and recall investigations, we continuously find that there were red flags all along that no one was paying attention to.”
— Dr. Darin Detwiler
Dr. Darin Detwiler, Founder & CEO | Detwiler Consulting Group, LLC
Dr. Detwiler is an author of two books on food’s past and future, a professor of food policy, a columnist on consumer perspectives on food, a keynote speaker, and a food industry consultant. He served two terms as an advisor to the USDA’s Secretary of Agriculture and worked with the FDA on new policies. The International Association for Food Protection awarded him with their 2018 Distinguished Service Award.
What food safety culture really means
Food safety culture isn’t a policy; it’s a mindset. It’s the shared values, norms, and behaviors that determine how every employee, from leadership to line worker, thinks about risk and responsibility.
“Companies that are recall ready, they don’t wait for a recall to be forced upon them by regulators or the media. They initiate recalls when necessary based on robust internal data because protecting public health is embedded in their core strategy, not just their crisis response manual.”
— Dr. Darin Detwiler
In a strong culture, employees act because they want to protect consumers, not because they’re told to. In a weak one, red flags go unnoticed or worse, ignored.
The red flags of a weak food safety culture
You can’t fix what you don’t see. According to Dr. Detwiler, here are the telltale signs your organization’s culture may be quietly eroding:
🚩 Inconsistent practices: Protocols shift from shift to shift. Standards exist on paper but not on the floor.
🚩 Silence over speaking up: Employees hesitate to report problems for fear of reprisal.
🚩 “Us vs. Them” mentality: Tension exists between production and quality assurance.
🚩 Reactive leadership: Issues are addressed only after external pressure or a recall forces action.
🚩 Disconnected data: Food safety insights arrive too late to prevent harm.
Each of these red flags signals a deeper issue: safety isn’t truly valued until it’s tested by crisis.
Data: The new early warning system
To illustrate the danger of waiting too long, Detwiler drew from his days as a nuclear engineer on a submarine. There were three types of dosimeters to detect radiation: one that gave real-time feedback, another with a delayed reading, and one that only registered exposure after catastrophe.
If your food safety data works like that third device, it’s likely already too late. Too many companies still rely on lagging indicators like recall notices, outbreak databases, or media coverage, rather than real-time data streams that can detect anomalies before people get sick.
“Using real time data empowers companies to act before widespread harm occurs, avoiding not only human suffering, but also reputational and financial damage.”
— Dr. Darin Detwiler
A proactive safety culture uses connected data as its first line of defense. Continuous monitoring, traceability, and automated alerts turn information into action, long before those red flags turn into headlines.
Intentional leadership: The antidote to complacency
The difference between crisis and prevention often comes down to leadership. Detwiler calls this “intentional leadership,” a deliberate, disciplined approach to anticipating risk rather than reacting to it.
“We need to move beyond crisis response to intentional proactive leadership. Being recall ready means we reject the notion that food safety ends at the point of sale or the point of consumption. Proactive companies extend their vigilance beyond the fork into what happens after the consumers eat the product.”
— Dr. Darin Detwiler
Intentional leaders don’t view food safety as a compliance checkbox. They see it as a core value that defines their brand’s integrity. They invest in systems that can trace risk in hours, not weeks. They empower teams to speak up. They take ownership before regulators come knocking.
Five cultural anchors for recall prevention
Dr. Detwiler outlined five anchor points every company should use to strengthen its food safety culture and reduce blind spots:
- Responsibility cannot be outsourced.
You can delegate tasks, but never accountability. Ownership extends across the entire supply chain.
- Silence is the first failure.
If employees don’t feel safe to speak up, small problems become public crises. Psychological safety is as vital as physical safety.
- Train for reality, not routine.
Mock recalls and drills must mirror real-world pressures: financial, operational, and emotional. Otherwise, they’re theater, not training.
- Never normalize the near miss.
Each time a risk is ignored, your tolerance for danger grows. Normalizing shortcuts is how cultures decay.
- Survival is not recovery.
The human toll of foodborne illness lasts a lifetime. Prevention means not just surviving a crisis but stopping it before it starts.
From red flags to resilience
Every organization has warning signs. The difference between those that endure and those that fall lies in whether they act on them.
“Legacy is defined by what you refuse to normalize.”
— Dr. Darin Detwiler
Dr. Detwiler’s message isn’t about fear but foresight. A culture rooted in awareness, transparency, and data-driven action doesn’t just prevent recalls. It prevents tragedy.
TraceGains helps companies build that resilience. Our global connected ecosystem automates and digitizes supplier and safety data, giving you the visibility to detect issues early, act fast, and protect both people and your brand.
See how TraceGains helps you stay ahead of recall risk and create a food safety culture that never looks away.
