Owning Safety: A Shift from Rules to Responsibility

Ray Mcguire, CSP, Senior Director, Safety, Fairlife, Llc

Ray McGuire is Senior Director of Safety at fairlife, LLC, where he leads enterprise safety strategy across operations and supply chain. He focuses on behavioral safety, risk prediction, and leadership coaching to build resilient cultures that protect people, consumers, and brand trust.

This article is based on an interview conducted by Food and Beverage Tech Review with Ray McGuire. The discussion explores practical strategies for strengthening food and workplace safety cultures, reducing operational risk, improving supplier accountability, and empowering leaders to drive lasting behavioral change.

From Policy to Practice: Living Food Safety Every Day

We’ve created a safety culture, and it guides everything we do. Our entire team takes ownership of food safety and people safety every day. This ownership mentality helps ensure each team member understands the “why behind the what” of protecting our consumers, our reputation and our people. This creates accountability and a standard way of working versus just “following the rules.”

Where Leaders Most Often Underestimate Risk in Daily Operations

Overconfidence in the equipment, the controls and the capability of our people can cause our leaders to fail to see the full extent or seriousness of the risks in our operation. In worst case scenarios, overconfidence can create a normalization of deviance from standards, leading to “predictable and often painful surprises”.

Simple Controls That Prevent the Biggest Safety Incident

The Risk Prediction tool and Behavior Based Safety Observations (BBSOs) are two procedures/protocols that can mitigate safety incidents. Risk Prediction allows teams to proactively plan and think about their risks and controls to avoid injuries. BBSO enables teams to have each other’s backs, actively coaching everyone on the team about unsafe behaviors and conditions while also reinforcing safe behaviors. When these two tools are consistently used, they allow teams to effectively control their risks instead of leaving it to chance.

Balancing Compliance with Speed and Flexibility

By teaching teams the WIFM (What’s In It for me) effect, there is often greater adoption of executing daily tasks according to safety standards. Doing this while also showing them how to “speed up by slowing down” helps to eliminate errors, focus on the task at hand and get the process right the first time.

Reducing Risk with Suppliers and Co-Manufacturers

Using a contract supplier management service (i.e., ISN, Avetta, Veriforce) to help vet your suppliers and contractors reduces this major workload and allows you to proactively manage their risk profile. For co-manufacturers, it is more about ensuring alignment with your company standards as a part of the contract, treating them as a true partner/ extension of your team in your processes and auditing them regularly to ensure they are meeting your company’s safety and food safety standards.

Influencing Leaders to Drive Lasting Cultural Change

Ensure your leaders understand how they can build impact and powerful influence with their teams when they take the time to get to know each individual; what they truly care about and what motivates them. This allows leaders to coach their people on all key metrics in a much more impactful way and leads to an enduring change to the culture of the organization with permanent behavioral changes, not just the behaviors in the moment. When leaders coach at the emotional level our teams more clearly see why they need to work differently and the impact their choices have on them, their families and the company. Ultimately, when leaders coach in this way, we can achieve real and lasting change around workplace safety and food safety culture.