Food Standards Agency

Challenge

It is estimated that there are around 2.4m cases of foodborne illness per year in the UK, the financial costs of which are approximately £9bn. To help manage this burden on public health and the economy more effectively, the FSA are looking to better understand kitchen life in a food business setting as well as in the home – particularly by examining the connection between behaviours, attitudes, beliefs and wider practices.

The original ‘Kitchen Life’ research was undertaken in 2013 and involved small-scale observation of kitchen behaviours in-situ. Fast forward to 2021 and we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, making face-to-face observation a little tricky. Thankfully technology has moved on since then.

Approach

This study is currently live and will run over the next 18 months. During this time we will identify, quantify and understand food hygienic practices across 80 domestic and catering kitchens. Led by Basis Social in partnership with Leeds University, Analytical People, Big Sofa Technologies and Bright Harbour we brought together a team comprising experts in qualitative, ethnographic, behavioural science, statistics and food safety research; and will be utilising cutting edge video technologies to gather robust behavioural data.

Using motion sensitive cameras, we will record over 400 hours of relevant kitchen behaviours. Footage will be livestreamed to our platform and coded, to understand the prevalence and frequency of a behaviour across cohorts (e.g. all incidents of hand washing); or within a cohort (e.g. handwashing in caterers with poor hygiene scores). We are delighted to be employing these kind of cutting-edge technologies in this context and huge respect to the FSA for helping pioneer this in the public policy arena.

Impact

Work is in progress but we will develop hypotheses on the factors affecting kitchen practices to inform the creation of targeted behavioural interventions; overseen by our statisticians, the data we gather will also inform the FSAs risk assessment models. Ultimately the outputs will inform the Agency’s risk assessment, management and communication, as well as broader policy.

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