Cultivating Safety: How Food Safety Champions Translate Regulatory Compliance into Frontline Practice

This Perspective examines a central problem in food safety governance: why organisations with well-developed food safety management systems, standard operating procedures, and audit mechanisms may still struggle to achieve stable and consistent frontline food safety practices. Using a narrative integrative review approach, this paper draws on the literature on food safety culture, organisational behaviour, institutional theory, implementation Champions, and frontline practice. It argues that the food safety is not only dependent on the effectiveness of the formal food safety systems, but also on how institutional expectations are interpreted, negotiated, reinforced, and enacted in everyday work. This paper introduces the concept of Food Safety Champions and conceptualises them as translational actors who can help connect formal food safety requirements with situated practice through meaning making, contextual negotiation and behavioural reinforcement. It further suggests that a Champion's effectiveness depends not only on individual initiative, but also on peer trust, organisational legitimacy, their informal networks and connections, enabling conditions, and continuous institutional feedback. This paper contributes a practice-based conceptual framework for understanding how formal food safety systems may become more meaningful, sustainable, and behaviourally effective in food production environments.