Food Protection Trends - January/February 2021 - 32

eating while shopping, (iii) licking their fingers to open a
plastic bag, and (iv) touching their hair, another part of the
body, clothing, or a cell phone before touching produce.
Poor food handling practices have also been observed
among consumers when shopping for fresh produce and
other food products at farmers' markets (2, 40). In a
representative U.S. sample of 937 individuals, Yu et al. (46)
found that 86% of participants considered fresh-cut produce
risky or very risky for harboring foodborne pathogens, but
71% reported that the fresh-cut produce they purchased
was unlikely or very unlikely to be contaminated with
foodborne pathogens. Researchers speculated that this
perception of a low probability of getting foodborne illness
from purchasing and consuming fresh-cut produce may be
due to the psychological phenomenon called optimistic
bias, wherein people comparing themselves with others
believe they are less likely to experience negative events
and more likely to experience positive events (11, 46).
Consumers also exhibit optimistic bias in terms of their
own food handling, believing that the likelihood of their
own behavior being the source of their foodborne illness is
lower than the likelihood of someone else being the source
of their foodborne illness (13, 42). This rationale stems
from the theory that people fear unfamiliar risks more than
familiar ones (13). Webster et al. (43) explored expert and
consumer perspectives in a risk ranking task and discovered
that experts and consumers disagreed most in the areas
of awareness and trust for issues they ranked the highest.
Another potential factor influencing the gap between
consumer and expert perceptions of food safety risks could
be that consumers may be less interested and/or less aware
of food safety risks in a noncrisis (i.e., non-outbreak)
situation. Consumers trust their grocery stores to provide
safe food and assume a status quo level of food safety. They
may pay more attention to food safety only when the status
quo is altered, for example, by a recall or outbreak (10).
The combined shopping and focus group data collected
in the present study support a positive effect of training
videos on participant knowledge and awareness of
food safety risks in grocery stores, especially safe food
storage temperatures, cleanliness and sanitation of food
storage areas, and the use of temperature rather than
visual or tactile methods as an indicator of safety. Several
participants noted that storage temperature information
was repeated across several videos, and one participant
stated that the repetition helped them to remember the
correct storage temperatures. Repetition has been cited
as a method for reinforcing food safety messages (18,
45), and the findings in the present study support the use
of repetition in interventions such as training videos to
effectively increase consumer recollection of food safety
information. However, the impact of the videos on the
ability of consumers to identify the same actual risks as
identified by the EHS is less clear. Participants may have

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Food Protection Trends January/February

grasped key food safety concerns from the videos in the
meat and poultry department more easily than in other
departments; experimental group participants were more
likely than the control participants to identify at least
one food safety risk in the meat and poultry department
that was also identified by the EHS. Although the videos
targeted package integrity and storage temperatures in
the meat and poultry department, which were two issues
identified by experimental group participants in agreement
with the EHS post-intervention, the greater agreement in
the meat and poultry department could be a result of more
risks being present in this department during the November
shopping session.
The higher number of perceived than actual food
safety risks, especially in the produce department, may
be associated with a tendency for consumers to attribute
visible quality indicators, such as bruising, spoilage, and
visible dirt on fresh produce, with food safety issues (12,
21). For example, participants reported thinking a food
was unsafe based on an " unappealing " appearance (21). de
Hooge et al. (8) came to a similar conclusion when they
investigated consumers' preferences for optimal products
(standard appearance or best-before dates farther in the
future) compared with suboptimal products (visual defects,
dented packaging, or past best-before dates). When given
the choice to purchase or not purchase from a supermarket
an apple with a brown spot, an oddly shaped cucumber,
and/or biscuits or fruit juice with damaged packaging,
which were considered suboptimal products by the research
team, de Hooge et al. found that only 2.6, 26, 6.2, and 3.3
of the 2,109 consumers selected the apple with the brown
spot, the oddly shaped cucumber, the damaged biscuits,
and/or the damaged fruit juice, respectively. These findings
suggest that consumers may view grocery store products
with visual defects, such as a brown spot, odd shape, or
damaged packaging, as " unattractive, unsafe to eat, and badtasting " (8).
Overall, participants identified higher numbers of both
actual and perceived risks in the produce, deli, and meat
and poultry departments than in the seafood department
and checkout area. These departments remained in the top
three even after focusing on only actual risks identified by
the experimental group during post-intervention shopping.
Many factors are likely to influence this pattern, including
a strong focus on easily identifiable food safety risks in
these departments, the larger size of these departments at
the stores shopped compared with the seafood department
and checkout area, and participant fatigue toward the end
of the survey (seafood and checkout were the last two
departments in the survey).
Relatively few actual or perceived food safety risks
were identified at checkout by shoppers and the EHS. No
guidance regarding mitigating food safety risks for the
checkout area of grocery stores appears in the 2013 FDA
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