Elsevier

Food Control

Volume 25, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 484-492
Food Control

Managerial attitudes, acceptance and efficiency of HACCP systems in Hungarian catering

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2011.10.054Get rights and content

Abstract

The Hungarian catering industry has to face up to numerous challenges nowadays because of rising costs and stagnating purchasing power. Under these conditions the managerial acceptance of the compulsory introduction of the HACCP system is rather mixed. This research is based on a direct question survey, with the aim of analysing the relation amongst the strategies of catering service managers, their attitudes towards food hygiene and the HACCP system, their managerial experiences about working with the HACCP system, as well as the evaluation of hygienic practice of catering service providers by independent specialists. More than 1100 questionnaires were processed. Two main approaches were analysed with regard to the general attitudes of catering managers: the hygiene and the cost-oriented approaches. The acceptance of HACCP systems lacked homogeneity to a significant extent. 28% of the respondents considered that the increasing quality and safety were the really important and necessary tasks. 41% of the respondents had a rather reluctant attitude towards their systems, mainly as a consequence of fear of extra investment and administrative burdens. Last but not least, the third group of managers accepted the importance of hygiene, but did not acknowledge the possibilities offered by HACCP for better work-organisation and clearer determination of responsibility. The structural equation analysis between the managerial strategy and attitudes, as well as the hygienic conditions, have proven numerous significant relations between these factors, but the results highlight the importance of efforts aiming at better integration of the HACCP approach in managerial activities. There is a real danger that this system will be simplified to accomplish administrative tasks.

Highlights

► Results of a survey, based on 1100 questionnaire on HACCP systems in Hungarian catering. ► Considerable differences in opinion of managers on utility of HACCP systems. ► Identification of different managerial approaches. ► determination of interrelationships between managerial attitudes, strategy and the hygienic conditions of the kitchen.

Introduction

The catering systems were developed rather rapidly in Hungary between the 1960s and 1980s. The so-called socialist industrialisation was based on an extensive use of manpower and the two-earner family model made it necessary to establish relatively well-equipped canteens in the proximity of public institutions and work places. The hygienic conditions of these facilities were supervised by rigid state inspection. The former social system, based on public ownership of means of production, collapsed at the end of the 1980s and this historic process exercised a deep-rooted effect on the catering industry too. In the 1990s, during the period of socio-economic transition, the role and structure of catering changed profoundly. There was a proliferation of numerous, small-scale catering enterprises, as a consequence of privatisation and a transformation of large-scale catering service providers. One part of public institutions and works kept the kitchens and canteens under their supervisions, while the others outsourced them. There was a rather rapid shrinking in monetary resources of public institutions (e.g. hospitals and schools) for catering. The majority of the catering enterprises began their activities with a rather low capital. The state inspection was reorganised and the food inspection declined. As a consequence of these processes the numbers of foodborne diseases increased rapidly.

As a result of the economic competition, owners tried to decrease their operational costs by decreasing the efforts to keep up hygiene. In our preliminary interviews with catering managers it became obvious that the acceptance of legal documents on the compulsory introduction of HACCP systems was rather mixed. The aim of this article is to determine the relationship amongst the strategy of catering enterprises, the managers’ qualifications and attitudes, and the practical effects of the HACCP system.

Section snippets

Literature background and hypothesis development

In the last decade food safety issues have played an increasingly important role in catering managers’ thinking. Coleman, Griffith, and Botterill (2000) proved that 96% of Wels caterers stated that compliance with the legislation would make them feel more confident about food safety. At the same time, the authors’ results raised doubts about the ability of some caterers to transfer positive attitudes about food safety in general into the implementation of specific actions and to identify steps

Data collection

The attitudes and opinions concerning the introduction and application of HACCP systems have been determined based on a direct question survey of catering managers, questioned by local members of the National Public Health and Medical Officer Service. In addition, these officers, who carried out these surveys, have been asked to evaluate the actual food hygienic situation of the given catering service provider. The content of this evaluating questionnaire is presented in Annex 1. The content of

Strategies of catering service providers

In the first phase of investigations we asked the catering service providers to evaluate the importance of some strategy elements (applying the vocabulary of strategic planning: elements of functional partial strategies) from the perspective of their business vision.

The main directions of thinking and business approaches were analysed by using the CATPA method (Fig. 1). Based on Cronbach’s alpha, two dimensions could be determined.

In his seminal work, Porter (1980) determined three types of

Acknowledgement

The research has been partially supported by OTKA K81594 project.

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