CULTURE PACK

A Food Safety and Quality Culture Tool for R750 a Year: Inside the ASC Culture Pack

By Mthokozisi Nkosi, Food Safety Specialist & Lead Auditor, ASC Food Safety · 13 min read

The Food Safety and Quality Culture Pack is a food safety culture tool that runs in a browser on ascfoodsafety.com. It collects anonymous worker and manager questionnaires through a QR code, gives the QA or technical manager a dashboard for training, feedback, inspections, indicators and maturity, drafts the action plan from the evidence, and produces the audit ready report in one click. It costs R750 per site for 12 months, and this article explains exactly what it does, what it does not do, and how a site uses it from purchase to audit day.

Why we built a tool instead of another template

ASC has sold food safety document toolkits for years, and every FSSC 22000 and BRCGS toolkit we sell carries a culture procedure, a survey template and a culture plan. They work. The problem is what happens after the templates are downloaded. The survey goes out once on paper, somebody spends three days typing the answers into a spreadsheet, the chart goes into a management review pack, and then nothing happens until an auditor asks for the second round and there is not one.

We saw the same pattern on client sites across South Africa: not a lack of intent, a lack of a system that made repeating the measurement easy enough that it actually got repeated. Enterprise culture software exists, but it is priced per employee in dollars for multinationals, and a 150 person site in Gqeberha or Polokwane is not going to sign that contract. So we built the tool we kept wishing our clients had, priced it at less than an hour of consulting time, and put it on our own website so there is nothing to install.

The culture clause is not failed by sites that do not care. It is failed by sites that measured once and could not face doing it again by hand.

What happens in the first fifteen minutes after you buy it

1. CheckoutBuy the pack on the product page and pay through PayFast by card, Instant EFT, SnapScan, Zapper or any of the other South African options. International cards are charged the rand amount at your bank’s rate.
2. Welcome emailYour workspace is created automatically and the welcome email carries your dashboard link. Log in with the email address you used at checkout.
3. Setup tabEnter the site name as it must appear on the report. Enter the admin email that must receive every response. Enter the name and email of the reviewer, your QA manager, technical manager or SHEQ executive, who must receive the report. Edit the departments, shifts, employment types and languages so the questionnaire matches your site. Label the round, for example 2026 baseline. Send a test email to confirm delivery.
4. Questionnaires tabPrint three QR posters: workers, managers and supervisors, and anonymous feedback. Copy the links for WhatsApp groups and notice boards.
5. Tell the siteAt the shift meeting: it is anonymous, results are for groups only, results will be shared within 30 days, and the point is to fix what is not working. Participation above 80 percent is the target.

How anonymity is built in, and why that decides whether the data is worth anything

A culture questionnaire that people believe can be traced back to them measures fear. Every score comes back at 9 out of 10 and the exercise proves that nobody trusts the process. So anonymity in the pack is not a setting, it is the design.

• No name, employee number, email address or login is asked for on either questionnaire or on the feedback link.
• No device identifier is stored. A phone that has already submitted in the round is warned before it sends again, and that is all the tool remembers.
• The optional grouping questions (department, shift, employment type, tenure, language) exist so results can be compared between groups. Results are only ever shown for groups.
• The admin’s per response email carries the department, shift, average score and any comment, and nothing that identifies the person.
• The raw responses in the Excel workbook carry the same grouping fields only, so the auditor can see the data without anyone being exposed.

Say all of this at the shift meeting before the round opens, and put it on the poster. The single biggest driver of participation we have measured on client sites is whether people believed the anonymity promise, and the second biggest is whether they saw the results from the last round.

What the manager dashboard measures, tab by tab

Suggested actions, objectives and the plan the auditor reads first

The part of the culture clause that decides the audit outcome is not the survey. It is what the site did about the survey. The pack drafts that for you, from the evidence, so the plan is never a blank page.

Every statement under 80 percent favourable, every indicator off target, every maturity criterion at level 1 or 2, every observed behaviour under 80 percent compliance, every competency gap and every concern not acknowledged in time becomes a suggested action with a timeframe. The suggestions come from ASC’s action library, the same one we use when we write culture plans on client sites, and they are specific: a flagged hand washing observation proposes a sink and supplies audit and a supervisor check at shift start, not “retrain staff on hygiene”.

You accept the actions you agree with, set the owner and the due date, and close each one with the evidence of completion and an effectiveness check. The objectives sit above the plan in the eight part format the schemes expect: objective, baseline, target, measure, owner, deadline, sections reached, review.

The report: one click, three formats, one signature

The Report tab builds the full culture report from whatever is on the dashboard: culture index, results by element and dimension, both questionnaires with the perception gap, maturity with evidence, training and competency, feedback and speak up, inspections and observations, the sixteen indicators with trends, the objectives, the action plan with due dates and status, an evidence map for the auditor, and a sign off block for the site head and the reviewer.

Print it to PDF for the file, download the Excel workbook with the raw anonymous responses and every record, or email both to the reviewer and the admin with one click. Sent reports are listed on the tab with their dates, so the second round can be laid beside the first.

How it maps to FSSC 22000, BRCGS, SQF, IFS and GFSI V2.0

The maturity criteria and the action library come from ASC’s FSSC 22000 culture toolkit, the same documents we install on client sites, so the pack and the toolkit speak the same language. If you already own the toolkit, the pack is the measurement engine that its culture procedure describes.

R750 a year: what that buys and what it replaces

The licence is one site for 12 months with unlimited questionnaire responses, unlimited records and reports, and email notifications. Renewal is the same price and extends the current licence from its expiry date. A group buys one pack per site so that each site has its own workspace, QR codes and report, which is also what a multi site auditor expects to see.

Who it is for, and who should call us instead

It is built for

• Sites certified or preparing for FSSC 22000, BRCGS, SQF or IFS that need evidence of culture measurement for the next audit.
• QA, technical and SHEQ managers who own the culture clause and have no budget line for it.
• Group technical managers who need the same measurement, in the same format, from every site.
• Consultants running culture programmes for several clients, who want a repeatable method and a report that looks the same every time.
• Sites that bought ASC’s culture toolkit or completed the FS320202 culture course and now need the measurement engine.

Call us instead if

• Senior management has not yet agreed that culture is a priority. A tool cannot create the commitment; a workshop with the site head sometimes can, and ASC runs those.
• The site is in the middle of a serious incident or a major non conformance. Fix the incident first; the culture programme comes after.
• You want somebody to run the first round, present the findings to management and write the culture plan. ASC does that, and the pack is the tool we use to do it.

Audit day with the culture pack

Open the report before the auditor arrives and print it. Walk them through it in this order: the objectives with baselines and targets, the action plan with owners, dates and closure evidence, the questionnaire results by department and shift with participation figures, the observation and inspection records, the indicators, the maturity assessment with its evidence fields, and the management review minutes that discussed all of it. Then hand over the evidence map and let them cross reference.

Two things to have ready alongside the report. The signed one page note explaining that rising near miss and speak up counts are the programme working, and the previous round’s report if you have one. A site with two reports and a trend has a culture programme. A site with one has a baseline, which is still a conformance if the plan and the review are there.

The first 30 days: a plan you can follow

1. Day 1Buy the pack, complete the Setup tab, send the test email, print the posters.
2. Days 2 to 5Shift meetings on every shift: why, anonymity, timing, feedback promise. Posters up. Links in every group. Tablet at the shift meeting for people without data.
3. Days 5 to 14Round open. Check participation daily by department. Chase the departments behind 50 percent. Enter the training and competency headcounts while you wait.
4. Days 14 to 21Close the round. Enter the last three months of indicators, the last GMP inspection scores, and do the maturity assessment from records with the QA team.
5. Days 21 to 25Review the suggested actions with the site head. Accept, assign owners and dates. Write two to four objectives in the eight part format.
6. Days 25 to 30Build the report, email it to the reviewer, table it at management review, and put the three lowest statements with their actions and owners on every shift board. Book the next round.

Frequently asked questions

Published by ASC Food Safety, South African food safety and quality consultants. This article is general guidance and not a substitute for certification-specific advice.