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- A conversation with food safety and allergen researcher Ivy Nyantakyiwa Tsibuah on why the last line of defense against foodborne illness is a person, not a procedure
By Christy Anyanwu
In the bustling kitchens of restaurants, school cafeterias, university dining halls and event catering facilities, food safety often depends on people whose work goes largely unnoticed. From the cook handling ingredients to the server transferring meals onto a tray, every action can determine whether food nourishes or harms.
Yet, while food businesses routinely conduct training sessions, administer tests and issue certificates, a critical question remains: Does knowledge acquired during training translate into safe practices when workers confront the pressures of everyday service?
For Ivy Nyantakyiwa Tsibuah, a food safety and allergen management researcher, the answer requires a closer examination of what happens beyond the classroom.
With an academic background spanning catering, hospitality and education, Tsibuah has spent years studying the disconnect between what food handlers know and what they actually do. Her experience teaching in Ghana and supervising food service operations at Pennsylvania State University, United States, has given her a perspective that bridges research, frontline practice and institutional management.
Her work focuses on a central concern: how to make food safety training practical, sustainable and capable of protecting consumers, particularly those living with food allergies.
In this interview with The Sun, Tsibuah speaks on the knowledge–practice gap, allergen cross-contact, the challenges confronting food handlers in Ghana and the United States, and why observing workers in action may be more important than testing what they remember.
Could you introduce yourself and describe the area you work in?
My name is Ivy Nyantakyiwa Tsibuah. I work in food safety and allergen management, specifically in how frontline food handlers are trained and whether that training changes what they actually do.
I hold a Bachelor of Science in Catering and Hospitality Education and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana. I am also completing a Master of Professional Studies in Hospitality Management at The Pennsylvania State University, with a minor in African Studies.
I am certified as a ServSafe Manager and in allergen management through AllerTrain.
My working life has had two halves. For about a decade, I taught, first in basic education in Ghana and later food and nutrition at the secondary level. I then moved into food service operations, and I now work in high-volume institutional dining at Penn State Campus Dining, where my responsibilities include supervising food service operations, staff training, sanitation compliance and inspection readiness.
The connection between those two phases is instruction. I came into food safety as a teacher, and that is why I am less interested in what a training module contains than in whether anyone acts on it afterwards.
You spent roughly 10 years in the classroom before moving into food service. What prompted that change?
It was less a change than a narrowing. I was already teaching food and nutrition, so the subject remained the same. What shifted was where I thought the teaching mattered most.
In a classroom, you are shaping what a student knows. In a kitchen, the same lesson can be the difference between a safe tray and an unsafe one, and it has to survive noise, time pressure, short staffing and people who are tired at the end of a shift.
My honours research was the turning point. Studying traditional caterers in Takoradi, I found people who were skilled, experienced and genuinely committed to feeding their communities well, but who were still working without the knowledge or structures that would have made their food reliably safe.
That was not a failure of character. It was a failure of training reaching the people who needed it. I have been working on that problem ever since.
Your honours research examined traditional caterers at Market Circle in Takoradi. What did that work involve, and why does it still shape your thinking?
Traditional caterers occupy a space that food safety research often overlooks. Street vendors get studied, and formal restaurants get regulated, but caterers who prepare food in volume for events, institutions and market customers often fall between the two.
Their risk profile differs from that of a street vendor. They handle larger batches, face longer holding times, transport food over distances and encounter more opportunities for temperature abuse and cross-contamination.
I examined what they knew, what they believed and what they actually did. What struck me most was the distance between those three things.
People could state a correct practice and then fail to perform it, not out of indifference but because the conditions of their work made it difficult.
That observation has organised everything I have done since. It is the same gap I later found running through international literature on food handler training, in American restaurants and hospital kitchens as much as in Ghanaian markets.
For readers outside the field, what is allergen cross-contact, and why has it become more urgent in the United States?
Cross-contact occurs when an allergen gets into food that is not supposed to contain it, not necessarily through an ingredient deliberately added to the food, but through a shared utensil, wiped surface, fryer, glove or serving spoon that has moved from one pan to another.
For most people, it is invisible and harmless. For someone with a severe food allergy, it can be a medical emergency.
The urgency in the United States comes from two sources. First, the FASTER Act of 2021 added sesame as the ninth major allergen, effective January 2023. This expanded disclosure and cross-contact obligations without expanding staffing or training time.
Second, and more fundamentally, Americans increasingly eat food prepared by someone else in dining halls, school cafeterias and institutional kitchens.
When people eat most of their meals in settings they do not control, their safety depends entirely on whether the people preparing that food were properly trained and whether that training has been retained.
Much of your published work centres on what you call the knowledge–practice gap. What is it, and why is it central to your research?
It is the finding that food safety training reliably raises what people know but does not reliably change what they do.
In my systematic review of 40 studies published between 2019 and 2026, this pattern appeared repeatedly.
In one study, 97 per cent of workers reported washing their hands before handling food, while 81 per cent were observed doing so. Approved hand-drying practices dropped from 75 per cent reported compliance to 43 per cent observed compliance.
In another study involving 712 restaurant staff, knowledge had no significant direct effect on allergen management practices; attitude did.
This matters because of how the industry measures success. We train, test, record a passing score and file it as evidence of compliance.
But a passing score measures recall under calm conditions. It does not measure what someone does on a Tuesday lunch rush when a colleague is absent.
If we evaluated training by observing practice instead of merely scoring tests, I believe we would discover that much of what we currently count as compliance is not necessarily protecting anyone.
You work in a large university dining operation. What does food safety look like at that scale, and what has surprised you about it?
The scale itself is the challenge. We are talking about thousands of meals, multiple venues, self-service lines where students handle shared utensils, high staff turnover and a large proportion of employees who are students themselves and may leave within two years.
Each of these features works against retaining safety training.
What surprised me was how much of the real risk sits at the serving line rather than in production.
Production kitchens have procedures, temperature logs and supervision. The serving line has a student worker, a crowd and a spoon that may have just been in something else.
Recent survey work on American campuses found that more than a quarter of students with food allergies had experienced a reaction in a campus dining hall, with most attributing those incidents to issues such as incorrectly labelled allergens. Regular allergen training for dining staff was among the improvements students requested.
That is not simply a production problem. It is a service and communication problem, and it requires a different kind of training.
What have you learnt about training adults who work on their feet, often with limited time?
I have learnt that almost everything I was taught about classroom instruction has to be adapted, and that most food safety training ignores this reality.
The standard model is an annual session lasting one to three hours, delivered once, tested once and then not revisited for another year.
Nothing in the adult learning literature suggests that this produces durable behaviour change, and the food safety literature does not support it either.
What works better is training that is shorter, more frequent, role-specific and tied to something the person will do within the hour.
Fifteen minutes before a shift, focused on one concrete practice, can be more effective than three hours in a room in August.
Training should also be role-specific. A serving line associate and a production cook need genuinely different competencies, and putting them through the same curriculum wastes both their time.
Most importantly, compliance should be verified by watching, not merely testing. My decade of teaching convinced me of this before the research literature confirmed it.
Sesame became the ninth major allergen in January 2023. What changed in practice, and what has not changed enough?
What changed on paper were disclosure and cross-contact obligations. What has not changed nearly enough is recognition on the ground.
Sesame is consistently the least recognised of the nine major allergens among food handlers, and it is genuinely more difficult to identify because it appears in places people do not always expect: bread and bun formulations, spice blends, sauces, dressings and ingredients where it is not visible.
It also created an unintended consequence. Some manufacturers responded to the rule by deliberately adding sesame to products so that it could be declared rather than controlled.
That means the ingredient landscape kitchens work with has shifted. A product that was safe two years ago may not be safe now. Most food handlers have not been retrained on all these developments because training hours did not expand when the allergen list did.
Your most recent work turns to school nutrition. Why focus on that sector?
Because the stakes are high and the margin for error is small.
Children in school meal programmes cannot always advocate for themselves, and for many of them, a school meal is the most reliable meal of their day.
Because these programmes are federally funded and regulated in the United States, what happens in one district is not an isolated local matter. The specific problem I examined is capacity.
USDA Professional Standards set minimum annual training hours: 12 for directors, 10 for managers, six for full-time staff and four for part-time staff. Those hours must cover procurement, civil rights, food safety, nutrition and other areas.
When sesame was added to the major allergen list, additional training time was not created. Allergen content therefore competes with subjects that already occupy the available hours.
I do not think the answer is simply to demand more hours, because that request may not be granted. I think the answer is to make existing hours work harder through role-specific, short-format and observation-verified training.
You have lived and worked in both Ghana and the United States. How has that shaped your perspective on food safety?
It taught me that the underlying problem is the same, even though the constraints are different.
In Takoradi, the constraint was infrastructure and access to training. In an American university dining hall, the constraints are turnover, scale and time.
In both places, people who wanted to do the work properly were being let down by how they had been prepared for it.
It also made me cautious about applying solutions across contexts.
A protocol designed for a well-resourced American kitchen may not suit a market stall, and vice versa. What does transfer is the method: observe what people actually do rather than rely on what they say, and then design training to close that gap.
What role do you see technology playing in food safety training over the next five years?
I am cautiously optimistic and slightly wary.
Mobile microlearning is genuinely promising because it fits how this workforce actually lives: short modules on a phone, delivered in the language someone is most comfortable with and when they need them.
Digital observation tools that allow managers to record practices during normal walkthroughs are similarly useful because they shift verification from testing towards watching. My concern is that technology makes it easier to generate documentation, and we already over-rely on documentation.
A completion certificate is not safe practice. If digital tools are used mainly to prove that training happened, they may make the knowledge–practice gap harder to see rather than reduce it. The question to ask of any new tool is whether it measures behaviour or merely participation.
What informed your choice of study and professional direction?
I began at Holy Child College of Education in Takoradi with a Diploma in Basic Education, and then earned a Bachelor of Education at the University of Education, Winneba, because I wanted to teach.
The pivot came with my Bachelor of Science in Catering and Hospitality Education at the same university. It is a degree that deliberately combines food and teaching, which is precisely the intersection I have worked in since.
The Master of Professional Studies in Hospitality Management at Penn State was about scale.
I understood kitchens, and I understood instruction, but I had not worked inside an operation large enough to see how food safety systems succeed or fail across many units at once.
I added the African Studies minor because my research interest in West African informal-sector food service is not incidental to my work. It is where the questions I care about first emerged.
Your work sits between kitchen staff, management and regulators. How do you bridge those groups?
By translating information and being specific about the audience.
A frontline worker needs to know what to do with their hands in the next 10 minutes. A manager needs to know which risks to watch for and how to verify compliance. A regulator or administrator needs evidence and documentation.
The same finding has to be expressed in three different ways, and most training material focuses on one audience while leaving the other two behind.
The second thing I do is try to bring proposals that cost nothing extra.
A recommendation that requires new positions or additional funding may be agreed with but never implemented. A recommendation that fits within the hours an operation is already required to deliver has a better chance of surviving contact with a real kitchen.
How demanding is the food safety field?
It is demanding in a quiet way.
There is no dramatic moment. The work is repetitive, and when it is done properly, it is invisible because success looks like nothing happening. It requires you to keep caring about a handwashing step for the ten-thousandth time and to keep noticing the thing everybody else has stopped noticing.
What is hardest is the asymmetry. A hundred safe services earn no notice; one failure can send a child to an emergency room.
That asymmetry is also what keeps me in the field.
Very few kinds of work let you draw a straight line from a 15-minute conversation before a shift to somebody not being harmed.
How would you assess the pace of food safety improvement in Ghana and across West Africa?
Genuine but uneven, and the unevenness is structural rather than cultural. Regulatory frameworks exist and continue to strengthen. What lags is building the capacity to inspect, train and support the enormous informal sector where most people actually buy their food. What I would resist is any framing in which knowledge simply flows from richer countries to poorer ones. The knowledge–practice gap I found in Takoradi is the same gap documented in American and European kitchens.
The informal sector has also developed practical solutions under constraint that formal operations could learn from.
What is genuinely needed is investment in research and outreach that treats caterers and vendors as professionals with expertise rather than as a compliance problem.
What advice would you give to someone entering food safety or hospitality education today?
Spend time on the line before you try to improve it. I would not trust my own recommendations if I had not worked shifts, run out of pans and had to make a decision with a queue forming. Credibility in this field comes from having done the job. Get the applied credentials early — ServSafe, followed by allergen certification — because they open doors and provide the vocabulary of the field.
Learn to read research properly because much confident advice in food service is not supported by evidence. And ask the uncomfortable question about your own work: not whether people learnt it, but whether they did it.
That question is harder to answer, and it is the only one that matters.
How do you define success in your work?
By observed behaviour, not completion rates. If I deliver training and the handwashing compliance I observe six weeks later is unchanged, then the training failed, regardless of what the post-test scores said. That is an uncomfortable standard because it produces disappointing results more often than the alternative, but it is the only honest one.
In the longer term, I want the work to outlive my involvement — a training protocol that a district or operation continues using after I have moved on because it fits their constraints and works. Materials that get adopted elsewhere matter more to me than materials that get praised.
What do you miss most about Ghana?
The food, and the way it is made.
Ghanaian cooking is communal and unhurried in a way that is difficult to reproduce here: people cooking together, talking and feeding whoever arrives. I cater Ghanaian cuisine partly to keep that alive and partly because it is how I stay connected to where my work began. I also miss the market.
Market Circle is loud, crowded and full of people who have been feeding their communities for 30 years. Everything I now do in a university dining hall in Pennsylvania started with watching them work, and I hope the research eventually gives something back to them.
