Our interest in learning from other sectors comes from a simple question: if food safety is a public health discipline, why assume it cannot learn from industries like aviation that manage life-critical risks daily? Aviation, having faced system failures and evolved through experience, developed auditing not just as an administrative step but as essential to survival.
Our understanding of aviation is that safety is not just a priority but the essential condition for the system’s existence. Aviation assumes failure is unacceptable but recognizes risk as inevitable. This has led to advanced risk management, learning, and auditing methods. Auditing in aviation is not just technical; it is integrated into its decision-making and improvement processes.
Aviation operates within a global safety framework, with auditing as a core safety activity rather than just a compliance exercise. Audits test whether the system can handle variability, human error, and pressure.
This perspective challenges how food safety audits are still too often positioned, particularly when driven primarily by certification cycles, customer expectations, or regulatory schedules rather than an explicit focus on operational risk.
Weak Signals and the Meaning of “Minor” Findings
In our view, a key lesson from aviation is how small deviations are handled. Minor noncompliance, procedural inconsistencies, or unusual data are not dismissed simply because no incident has occurred. They are weak signals of possible system drift and are analyzed because they often precede harm.
In food safety auditing, minor nonconformities are often recorded, corrected, and closed with little reflection on their significance. Over time, this matters, as aviation shows that repeated minor deviations often indicate systemic issues rather than single major failures.
This understanding is evident when we consider foodborne illness events, which rarely come from a single breakdown. More often, they result from gradual erosion: routine monitoring shortcuts, sanitation tasks that lose rigor under pressure, or corrective actions that address symptoms rather than causes.
Aviation emphasizes that auditors should interpret patterns rather than just findings. The value of an audit lies in recognizing trends as much as identifying nonconformities.
From Audit Reports to System Intelligence
Aviation uniquely integrates audit outcomes into decision-making, affecting maintenance, training, operational approvals, and resource distribution. Auditing influences daily operations and work organization beyond report filing.
This integration contrasts with typical food safety practice, where audits are treated as one-off events. After closing findings, priorities often shift back to efficiency, output, and cost, with minimal follow-up on audit insights.
Learning from aviation shifts how we view audit conclusions, treating them as part of ongoing system management rather than as results. This encourages food safety auditors to focus on system reliability and resilience instead of just compliance. Clear conclusions that explain what findings mean for control under normal and stressed conditions are more likely to guide effective operational decisions.
Our understanding of aviation emphasizes the role of culture in audit effectiveness. Aviation has invested in a culture that promotes reporting, transparency, and learning. Though not perfect, this approach acknowledges that hiding issues carries risks, while exposing them enables improvement. Audits within this culture provide more accurate and complete information.
In the food sector, fears of customer reactions, certification loss, or reputational damage can hinder openness during audits. In aviation, auditors’ behavior positively influences audit accuracy through how they ask questions, handle uncertainty, and communicate findings.
Aviation emphasizes system performance over procedures. Audits verify systems work under real conditions, not just documented procedures. This approach reveals gaps between design and practice.
Food safety auditing often focuses more on documented compliance than on how controls perform in real-world situations. As demonstrated in aviation, safety results not just from procedures but from the behavior of systems under pressure, variability, and human limitations.
Auditing as a Mindset in Safety-Critical Systems
Ultimately, aviation teaches us to adopt a mindset, not just tools. It treats auditing as a strategic safety activity vital to risk management in complex systems. When food safety auditing adopts this perspective, it goes beyond checklists to anticipate failures, strengthen controls, and protect public health.
Examining aviation underscores the significance of food safety. Learning from an industry with established auditing practices improves our judgment and recognizes food safety auditing as a crucial safety discipline, comparable to those in the most demanding industries.
