Preparing for SQF Edition 10: How Secchi Helps Build a Food Safety Culture

SQF Code Edition 10 is on the horizon, bringing significant updates to how food manufacturers manage food safety. Perhaps the most notable change is a new emphasis on food safety culture and employee engagement. In fact, Edition 10 is scheduled for release in mid-2025, with audits under the new code set to begin in the first half of 2026 (sgs.com.) For quality and safety managers, operations leaders, and even the C-suite, this means compliance will require more than just paperwork, it means proving that your team actively lives a culture of food safety every day. In this post, we’ll outline the new SQF Edition 10 requirements around employee engagement and culture, and how Secchi is a great fit to help food producers meet (and exceed) these expectations.

SQF Edition 10: A New Focus on Food Safety Culture and Engagement

In Edition 10, food safety culture truly takes center stage. SQFI (the Safe Quality Food Institute) is introducing a formal Food Safety Culture Plan with clear objectives and performance measures, designed to instill a shared commitment to food safety from leadership down to frontline workers (sqfi.com.) In other words, having a positive food safety culture is no longer optional, it’s becoming an auditable requirement.

So, what does a “food safety culture plan” actually entail? According to SQF Edition 10, companies will need to go beyond checklists and demonstrate comprehensive strategies for:

• Effective communication: ensuring food safety policies, expectations, and values are clearly communicated across all levels of the organization.
• Comprehensive employee training: making sure every employee is properly trained and competent in food safety practices.
• Systematic feedback mechanisms: establishing ways for employees to provide input on food safety and for management to gauge the culture (e.g. surveys, suggestion systems, regular meetings).
• Continuous improvement processes: proactively identifying opportunities to improve and embedding food safety into daily routines, not just during audits (sqfi.com.)

This approach transforms food safety from a mere procedural task into an organizational mindset, empowering employees at every level to become active guardians of food safety (sqfi.com.) It also means auditors will be looking for tangible evidence of culture: they want to see that management is engaged, employees are involved, and there is ongoing accountability. With Edition 10 on the horizon, expectations around leadership involvement, food safety culture, and measurable accountability are only increasing (registrarcorp.com); now is the time to strengthen your top-level commitment and frontline engagement.

Engaging Your Team: The Key to a Strong Food Safety Culture

Why such a focus on engagement and culture? Simply put, even the best food safety plan fails if the people on the plant floor aren’t bought in. Food safety culture is the collective behavior and mindset of your team. When employees are engaged, when they understand why food safety matters and feel personally responsible for it, they are more likely to follow procedures, speak up about potential issues, and contribute ideas to improve processes. This leads to fewer mistakes and a safer product. On the other hand, if employees are disengaged or if leadership doesn’t model the importance of food safety, then requirements can easily become “check-the-box” exercises that don’t hold up under pressure.

SQF Edition 10 recognizes that reality by pushing companies to actively involve all personnel in food safety. Building this kind of culture means making food safety a part of daily conversation. It means leadership regularly walking the floor and talking about safety, not just during audit prep. It means celebrating employees who do the right thing and coaching those who need improvement. It also means having systems in place to gather feedback. For example, if an operator notices a risky practice or has an idea for a safer process, there should be a clear, blame-free way to communicate it. All of these practices contribute to an engaged workforce that takes food safety to heart.

However, creating and sustaining a food safety culture is not easy. It requires consistency, documentation, and time – resources that are often stretched thin. Many food companies struggle with questions like: How do we measure something as “soft” as culture? Are our supervisors consistently engaging with their teams about food safety? How can we prove to an auditor that our employees are truly involved? This is where having the right tools can make a big difference.

How Secchi Can Help Meet SQF’s Culture & Engagement Requirements

Secchi is a cloud-based, mobile-friendly employee engagement and performance management platform designed to help organizations manage their people more effectively. In the context of SQF Edition 10, Secchi provides a powerful solution for food producers to build, nurture, and demonstrate a strong food safety culture. Here are several ways Secchi can support your efforts to meet the new culture and engagement requirements:

• Real-time Communication & Recognition: Secchi makes it easy for managers and supervisors to give on-the-spot feedback, coaching, and positive recognition to employees. Encouraging and acknowledging the right behaviors in real time helps reinforce your food safety values. In fact, fostering a culture of recognition, coaching, engagement, and accountability is vital for achieving high-performing teams. By recognizing employees for following food safety procedures or catching potential issues, you create an environment where safe behaviors are noticed and rewarded – which motivates the whole team to stay engaged.
• Corrective Action Documentation Made Easy: One of the pillars of food safety compliance is showing how your team responds when things go wrong, and SQF Edition 10 expects companies to not only address non-conformances, but also document the actions taken and ensure accountability. Secchi allows supervisors and managers to log corrective actions in real time, right at the point of issue. Whether it’s a safety protocol violation, a GMP lapse, or a coaching moment following a near miss, the interaction is recorded with context. This not only builds a verifiable timeline of what occurred and how leadership responded, but also reinforces consistent follow-through across the organization. When audit time comes, these records serve as powerful evidence that your culture of accountability is active, not theoretical, and that your organization doesn’t just catch issues, it fixes them and learns from them.
• Documenting Engagement and Training: One challenge with “culture” is documenting it – but Secchi simplifies this. The platform gives leaders a simple way to log one-on-one coaching conversations, team huddle meetings, safety chats, training check-ins, and more. These records provide hard evidence of your food safety culture in action. You can track who attended the monthly safety meeting, which topics were discussed in a coaching session, or how many times each employee has been coached on GMPs. Over time, this builds a rich timeline of engagement. When an auditor asks how you involve employees in food safety, you can pull up Secchi reports to show attendance, discussion topics, and participation – proof that you’re not just talking about culture, but actively living it. Secchi’s platform encourages ongoing communication and feedback between managers and their teams (instead of sporadic, once-a-year reviews), which is one of the most effective ways to improve performance and engagement. 
• Employee Feedback and Empowerment: SQF’s culture plan calls for feedback mechanisms, and Secchi helps facilitate that. The tool isn’t just top-down; it can enable two-way interactions. For example, supervisors can record an employee’s improvement suggestions or note issues raised during a shift. This creates a systematic feedback loop where front-line employees have a voice. Secchi’s philosophy of engagement and empowerment helps foster a culture of continuous improvement. When workers see that their input leads to action, they become more invested in the food safety mission. This aligns perfectly with SQF’s intent to empower employees at every level as active contributors to food safety (sqfi.com.)
• Continuous Improvement & Accountability through Data: Another requirement of a food safety culture plan is having performance measures and continuous improvement processes. Secchi excels here by automatically tracking key metrics and making them visible. Its reporting dashboard gives managers and executives a clear view of trends in areas like attendance, training completion, corrective actions, and recognition given. You can quickly identify where engagement is high or where there might be gaps. For instance, if one department has low participation in safety meetings or repeated issues not being addressed, the data will spotlight that so you can take action. Conversely, you’ll see where strong leadership and engagement are driving positive results. This data-driven approach creates accountability at all levels – an objective way to measure the “effectiveness of food safety activities,” just as global food safety standards call for (sgs.comsgs.com.) By using Secchi, you align with SQF Edition 10’s push for clear objectives and performance measures in your culture plan (sqfi.com.) In short, you’re turning the abstract concept of culture into tangible metrics that drive continuous improvement.

Conclusion: Be Ready to Lead the Way

SQF Edition 10 represents a shift from simply having food safety policies, to ensuring a food safety mindset exists throughout your organization. This is a fantastic opportunity – not just to pass audits, but to build a safer, more productive, and more resilient food company. By focusing on employee engagement and culture, you’ll likely see benefits beyond compliance: better teamwork, higher morale, and even lower turnover as people take pride in their work.

Preparing for these new requirements doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the right approach and the right tools, you can transform the SQF culture standards into real positive change on your plant floor. Secchi is an easy-to-implement tool that can help make food safety culture tangible, trackable, and achievable on a daily basis. Instead of culture being a buzzword, Secchi helps make it part of everyone’s routine, from the shop floor to the top floor.

Ready to strengthen your food safety culture and ace those SQF Edition 10 requirements?

Secchi can support you every step of the way. Book a demo with us to see Secchi in action and learn how it can be tailored to your operation. You’ll discover how investing in your people and culture today sets you up for success under SQF Edition 10 and beyond, turning compliance into a catalyst for excellence in your business.