Hello, everyone. Welcome to Real Talk with Tia and Jill. Happy Monday. Happy Monday. We're so glad you could be here. We have a special guest with us, Paula Schwartz. Welcome, Paula. So good to have you here, Paula. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited. We are too. Yeah, we're so glad that you're kicking off your Monday morning with us. So thank you for that. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And if this is your first time joining us, I'm Tia, this is Jill, our special guest, Paula. And every Monday we go live on YouTube talking about things that's happening in the food industry, having real conversation, honest conversations about people leading in food. And today's topic is all about react, recover, repeat, right? Like we're all in this circle of we react, we recover, and then we repeat. and why it's failing you, right? And foreign material, which is Paula's, and maybe your passion. Your passion around foreign material. I'm gonna really enjoy this conversation today because in the food industry, it's one of the clearest examples of how reactive our industry still is. And it costs us from a culture standpoint, from a financial standpoint, even from an emotional standpoint. So we're so excited to have you here today. Paula is actually at FlexRay that is a leader in foreign material recovery and prevention and someone that really we've had the pleasure of knowing. And Jill, you've had the pleasure of working with personally. Yes, I have. So Paula and I have, I guess we go back years from not only working together, but also Paula was like our technical rep for when she was at Mary You and then I joined Mary You. I wanna say, did you recruit me? I was thinking like, how did I get there? Sort of, yes. I think, I don't remember if you called me to say, hey, there's a job open or if I called you and was like, hey, I'm ready to leave. Is this job something you'd recommend? I don't remember how that flowed, but. I think what happened was you call me, you're like, hey, should I do auditing? I'm like, hey, no, you should come work with me instead. And that worked out. Yeah, it did. It did. Yes. And we were talking about this last week at the prep call. Like, it's so funny because I literally like I can close my eyes and I can see us at that little table having breakfast. Like the first time you were kind of showing me the ropes and like that's exactly what happened. But for everybody in the audience, that was my first introduction to even the thought of professional coaching or whatever. And I told you all this all the time and I'll probably tell her and tell we're too old to talk to each other that that was very pivotal. pivotal in my career because I didn't jump on the coaching bandwagon then, but I see how important it is. And whether you have a mentor, a coach, if you're the mentee or you hire somebody outside or you have some sort of that kind of opportunity within your own organization, I just think it's so valuable. And when I started my career, certainly that wasn't a thing. I had mentors and mentee. I was a mentee for sure. And they weren't like paid or formal or whatever, but I had those people. I think everybody does. And so Jill, I will always appreciate that. And when I talk to Jill and Tia both, I just tell them how awesome I think that is that they have this platform and they're using it to, you know, help people on all levels. And so I appreciate it. And thank you guys for that a lot. Oh, we appreciate you. Yes. Well, and I think it's really cool because, you know, Obviously our part of what we do is like, how do we make sure, how do we help people have more success professionally, personally, all of it, like taking care of your whole being well-being. Cause we know there's plenty of papers and data that shows when we take care of people, they take care of business. So that is a huge passion for us, which really is a little bit about today too and foreign material. Yes. Yes. You know, but I do want to start off and I don't know if this is the exact if this is the correct stat. So you you can certainly correct me. But last now it's actually been two weeks right at IPPE when Flexray was sharing kind of the state of the state of the union report on foreign material. And I believe Kurt said something that like seventy seventy two percent, I think, is the number that sticks with me. of companies have dealt with a foreign material issue in the past quarter alone. That's correct. OK, is that correct? Because I was like, that's a lot, but I was also like, I would say there's even more that deal with it way more than just on a quarterly basis. For sure. And this was a customer survey that we did. So, of course, it was people that, you know, we ask that work with us and are comfortable. But I like to start out conversations when I'm talking to a customer or I'm in a big room like we were at IPPE and like, hey, think about the last time you had a foreign material incident. And if you know, you start asking people to raise their hands or think about the last time they had it, you know, we're going to get many more hands than just quarterly. So usually I start with quarterly and then we go to monthly and then we go to, you know, weekly and, you know, those kinds of things. And it really puts into perspective that you're not the only ones and whether it's, you know, blue plastic gloves or it's a metal contamination or something else, these things happen. And, you you know, the whole subject of this is react, recover, repeat. Well, how are you, you know, is it a reaction, you know, just like it was last time or what are we doing different or is this preventable? So thinking about that and I, you know, frequently will see if somebody in the audience wants to share about something that's happened to them recently or, um, if not, I tell them two different examples. One's when I worked for a, um, restaurant chain and a situation we had. And another one was when I was actually a QA manager in a plant. So both of those, you know, when I start telling those stories, then people are a little more open to, you know, sharing or at least contributing to the conversation about, hey, this happened to me. This is what I needed to do. And I think that's really important in food safety that we're all just here to help and improve because when somebody has a recall, and I was actually talking to a customer about this Friday, when somebody has a recall, it doesn't matter if it's your company or somebody else's, it has negative effects on all of us. And so even though Flexray is an inspection service, third party, we want you to do better. We want you to get better. We want less, we want less incidences. And some of my customers tell us, Hey, it's our job to get to a, run you out of business, which I laugh about, but I understand that. And the other thing is they'll come to us and say, hey, our goal is to reduce foreign material by thirty percent for this year. And I think that's an awesome goal. And we can see those results within customers when they do different things. And we're really interested in how they're going to approach that, what they're going to do and if there's really a way we can help them. But at the end of the day, these things still happen. and you know are you prepared for it have you done the right things but um when anybody calls me i always remind them to thank and appreciate whoever actually did their job and put something on hold or raise their hand or whatever because twenty some years ago when i was in a plant um reporting something like that maybe wasn't as championed as it is now, it was like, hey, somebody messed up and we're going to point fingers. And I think, you know, something you guys really hone in on is food safety culture and leadership and all of those things. And so depending on the plant you're in or the organization you work for, some of companies are really great at this and some of them still have, you know, some improvement. So if you have something on hold, be happy about that it's contained and then we can hopefully help you work through the situation versus it got beyond your control and now what are you gonna do right yeah that's a really good point because that exactly what you're talking about that speaks to culture right how do people respond to having an incident straight like in the immediate response right of someone saying hey we have a foreign material issue we need to stop the line we need to put product on hold how are they responding there and to your earlier point how are they responding now that they found it what things are they putting into place to ensure it doesn't happen again or are they reacting recovering repeating well yeah no for sure you know we have so much more awareness around this around foreign material and we have better technology to help us find foreign material you know you're in the thick of it every day kind of working with this and with clients so i'm curious even from your perspective you know since we do have these in this increased awareness like why what is it that you think This tells us about our industry and how we even view foreign material, that we keep having it, or seventy two percent of companies say I've had foreign material in the past quarter. So a little bit like I was just talking about, I think we're doing better and I think there's a heightened awareness around foreign material. You know, it depends on the company for sure and what the foreign material is. And like I said, some of our customers will straight out tell us, hey, we want to get twenty or thirty percent better. And in some of those instances, hey, they have improved thirty percent of their customer complaints. So that part of it looks better, but they're still having the same amount of incidences in-house, but they're able to contain it so it doesn't get to the next step. So even though we haven't necessarily fixed the foreign material issue in the facility, they're doing the things better, you know, one step ahead so they're still working backwards to hey can we can we prevent this foreign material incident or whatever but it's not getting out of our control or we're not having a customer complain so in my mind as um somebody from the outside when my customer tells me that they're winning on a level but they want to win you know it's still at the preventative measure and so there's a couple of things with that first of all i think you know humans are still involved And if we know that things are going to happen, not everything's going to be perfect, no matter how many programs and procedures and things you have in place, they still have to be executed. You still have to do audits or checks, watch videos, do line checks as a supervisor. As a QA person, are people doing what they're supposed to do? It starts with GMPs. And you want to say all this stuff starts with leadership, which I think is huge. And it does need to start from the top down. Like people need, you know, it needs to be bought in by your operations manager, operations VP, those kind of people, your maintenance team, all that. But at the same time, you need to empower the employees to do the right thing and, you know, have them own it because you don't have to have a title to be a leader. You don't have to have a title to find a foreign material or speak up when something happens. So again, There's lots of pieces to that. And if everybody owns their piece, you know, that's important. I was actually talking to a customer last week and we were talking about possibly coming into their facility and not necessarily doing an audit, but just kind of a third set of eyes and talking about foreign material with a group of people and then going on the floor and doing this. But She said, she goes, you know, I have these great ideas, but I sit here in this office and I don't know what these people are experiencing every day. And so she goes, it might be really beneficial if, you know, you all talk to them and say, see if you're getting a different response than, you know, I do or somebody, you know, on her team does, but that's at a higher level. And I think that's a really good thing. And I think if you've been through an audit and those kind of things, When you talk to the people really doing the job, you get a much better perspective on what's happening. And I think you need to take those comments and observations into effect. If you've had the incident already, you're kind of in the thick of it and you're wanting to figure out, can we save this product? What do we need to do at the moment? But then when you go back and you do post-op, of the situation and you look at those things, that's where you start your real preventative program versus a reactive program. Because even when you're in the thick of it, whether you're doing a root cause analysis or you're doing an investigation or all those things, you're still in the heat of the moment. yeah and everybody's trying to get a pretty quick answer right now and i think it's you know on all levels you can if you can go back and evaluate the situation and look at all the pieces post and then hey what can we do moving forward and what what parts of this are really preventable and what of them are hey, this is the situation and now this is where we want to be. I think that gives you a good starting point of beginning the process of being proactive versus reactive, if that makes any sense at all. So what I hear when you talk about you know, people that you've seen and clients you've worked with that are more reactive, maybe they're not going back and doing that root cause analysis. Is that what you see? So, you know, I think everybody does a root cause analysis, but are we checking the boxes to complete the paperwork or are we doing root cause analysis to get a different result? And I think that's where the difference is on companies that have reduced their foreign material by thirty percent in the last year versus the ones that um we've heard this multiple times from customers using us as a crutch hey we're gonna we're gonna check the boxes but if it if it goes bad we'll just send it to flex right hey which we love we we love your business that is right thank you but if you want to get better you know there's something to look at and something we're really pushing is, you know, supplier verification, supplier monitoring, supplier approval programs. And a lot of companies have these on the micro side. You know, you have a seminal spec or expectation, you have a listeria, you know, expectation, or you have testing results that you won't accept product until you have, you know, those results from your customer and things. And again, I feel like the foreign material side of this in terms of supplier approval, monitoring all the things is probably ten to fifteen years behind the micro side. But when you when you look at the situation, I'm informed material is the third leading cause of recalls right behind micro and allergens in the food industry. So why is management looking at this different? I don't know if that's I don't feel like FSQA is looking at it as differently as, you know, procurement operations and those kinds of things, but you really need to evaluate the situation and are these suppliers really causing you a problem? And if you would have done some preventative inspection or approval prior to this, how much product could you have saved? I currently have a situation going on with a chicken company, And it was a seasoning supplier and we have a very large amount of product that we're inspecting right now. And had we just inspected the seasoning, the scope would have been much, much smaller. And so when you think about those type of situations, hey, does it make sense to check on somebody monthly or quarterly as a preventative program versus a reactive program? I think there's a lot of opportunity to improve and get better in terms of those type of things. So are we getting better? Yes, but there's really some kind of pretty easy ways to at least start collecting some data and monitoring those things to see if that could also improve your foreign material incidences and how quickly and by how much. That's almost like a whole other level of adding on verification or validation of your risk assessment. Yes. Because I think foreign material, I mean, right, depending on the industry you're in, depending on where you go to for your sources on that, sometimes we forget about like combing through the ones that we internally see to say like, what's the, what actually is the risk, whether it's an income material or in this process that we have seen. Well, in kind of what you've talked about kind of reminds me of this, this place, or I don't know if it's attitude or, um, spot where we almost like kind of accept foreign material and woof, we, we found it. Yeah. But that's really different than preventing. Right. I love the example you used where we prevented it from getting to a customer, but we still had it going on internally. And even that's like money, right? Money, labor, rework, all the above. I mean, extra money if you need to send it out, like all the above when you think about the extra touch points around food that maybe we didn't need if we had to prevent it. Right. No. And I think one example that comes kind of the top of my mind on this is the pet food industry, because they get a lot more bulk ingredients, you know, in terms of like soybeans and corn and chicken meal and like all those things. And I mean, I've seen what comes in on those trucks and their bulk. So I, If I'm going to help somebody out and that, you know, it has to be a bad product. But they have put kind of a coalition around this and they did some really great work. But one of the things they even were talking about internally was when we find it we're not giving the supplier all the information they need you know related to the foreign material that they found so you know documenting or investigating you know where exactly it's coming from versus hey we got a load of you know chicken meal and we found some you know metal hooks in it or something versus hey this is the lot this is the production like all the pieces that really help you do an investigation. And so I think that's key. And it goes back to root cause analysis. Like, are you doing a real investigation to find the real information that will help you make decisions that you can put other things in place or change the way you're doing something, you know, all those kinds of things. And there's so many pieces of it. But if you start with, Gathering is, I mean, even when we get questions from customers, we rarely get, you know, all the information that is needed to, you know, pallet information, you know, production, like all the things, all the things that you need to do to do a proctor investigation. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Tia. Well, I'm curious, like, even as you talk about that, I think that that shines a light on if you're being proactive or reactive, right? Like, is that information readily available for people to be able to find and collect? I almost think about it like, is it wrapped up in a bow that you can find that information? Or is it tedious to go find? Is it not in a spot where you can easily find it? Is it buried in a handwritten check that you've done a couple of weeks ago? Is it easily accessible? And I think sometimes that leads organizations to being more reactive because they really don't have the systems in place to kind of help people document and find this information when it's needed. I completely agree. And a couple of things on that, you know, if you have gamble walks, you know, those are really important. You know, people following your preventative maintenance programs. And if there is a failure, you know, looking at, hey, was this on PM? Was it followed? Or is it one of those things that, hey, we had to run, you know, this Saturday, so we didn't do it and it didn't get re-put back on the list? Are the pieces of gaskets or different pieces of equipment, are they the ones that are actually detectable if there is a problem, things like that. But the other thing that I hear over and over in is if operations are put in charge of reporting these situations instead of FSQA, they own the problem. And if they have to report that on a big call on Monday morning to know the president or you know the vp of whatever um on their ownership of the foreign material then you get a lot more buy-in from these other groups in fsqa you know i used to say when i was in the plant we were the police and I still feel like that's probably right. But you really don't want to be the police. You just want to be the people there to verify or validate that everybody else is doing their job. And you don't want to catch people. You want to be there to help and support, which is really the job of a police officer anyway, keep everybody safe. And FSQA should be the same thing. It shouldn't be like an oh, I got you kind of thing. Yeah, we like to think about it, it's not really policing, it's partnering. We're partnering with you to make sure that We're making safe, quality food, and we're here to help supply that support. And I think that also goes back to what you were talking about earlier on just empowering others to speak up and to say, hey, I see this issue going on. It reminds me of one time when a temporary stopped the line because she saw these really tiny metal flakes on the product. And we, I mean, it turned into actually a really big thing where we ended up having to shut down and taking the filler apart. Like it became a really big thing. And I remember afterwards, she was like, I'm so sorry. And I'm like, no, you did your job. You did your job. And if you see anything else, I need you to say something. Right. Like no one gave her any problems about it. But she felt I remember she felt so bad that when I circled back around during sentence, we had to go down and clean. Like it was a it was a big thing. And she was like, I'm so sorry, Tia. And I'm like, no, like this is exactly what you're supposed to do. Like, you're supposed to bring those things up. Like, you're our eyes out here. Like, I'm not going to ever see that. Like, you are because you do the checks, you run the product. And she was just a temporary. And she was like, eventually she came on full time. And I mean, she's an amazing employee. But it's one of those things when you talk about empowerment and really getting down to root cause, everyone must feel that way. Right. Everyone must feel like I can stop the line. I can start the conversation. Right. We we may even say, oh, you know, this is one filler head we need to take out and everything was fine. Right. And that was it. But it's like you never really know. And when I'm here, you talk about your clients that Some are more proactive than others. Some lean into empowering others. It reminds me of that situation where anyone feels like, hey, I can call out an issue. And then that next step, that next step of, well, we're going to find out what is really causing this issue so we don't have it again. I mean, I think that is amazing. And I hope that like you told the whole world that she did that because my one foreign material incident, somebody reported it to the supervisor and the supervisor didn't make the right decision. And that's why we had foreign material in restaurants. And so it was a very big thing, but like, you know, telling these people, Hey, you found this and this prevented this much more product from being affected or having to be thrown away or wasted or all the things. And if you can, um, materialize that for them, say, Hey, this person did this. And yeah, we had a hundred thousand pounds on hold, but if we waited, waited until the next ship shut the next check or the end of the shift or whatever, it would have looked like this. And this is how much, so, you know, making it real always resonates with people. And I think, um, I'm just like, I think that's amazing that you have that story you can tell people because that will make an impact. And rather than just do your checks, report it to the supervisor, you know, the whole it doesn't make it real until it's real. Right. Well, you know, being on the other side, coming from meat often, if there was foreign material, what that meant is, oh, We're going to have to go through all that meat and try to visually inspect it ourselves. And then that's going to mean overtime or a Saturday. And I wish we had had like back in the day, a flex ray to be able to help us because those were things that just made it painful. And without a culture of support made it, I don't want to say made it easy, but You know, when people are deciding between, am I going to have my weekend to do my thing or go see my family? And I don't think it's a really big deal. They're going to choose, you know, that that's an environment that we've created where it can make that choice hard. It doesn't mean that they're a bad person. It just means we've not put them in a good spot to be able to make an easy choice. Right. Yeah. So Paula, that leads me to wonder, because there's still a lot of companies that will be like, well, we're just going to try to rerun it through our own equipment, or we're going to try to re-inspect it. And I wonder, like, what do you notice about companies you're working with? Like, how do they, I don't know if normalize is the right thing, but kind of normalized to say, gosh, if this does happen, we know running it back through our process, whatever that may look like, isn't necessarily the answer. And yeah, we notice about this all the time. You know, are you doing the same thing and expecting the same results? I mean, it goes back to just that simple thought. But like you were just saying, oh, if I choose this, then I have to come in on Saturday. And yeah, I'm going to give it paid overtime, but I don't want to be here. So. Is the attitude of your employees doing the re-inspection, is it where it should be? Are they actually trained to do what you're asking them to do? Like maybe you have an inline x-ray machine and you're asking them to rerun it through the same machine and they don't really know what they're looking for. They're just going through the motions. I use this example when we were in the micro world, Jill, but hey, you want to have your own lab. but you're good at making chicken. Make your chicken, let us do the lab work. It's the same thing with x-ray. We're good at what we do, let us help you. And even if your machines have the capability of detecting same or similar levels than ours, you're running at a production speed. We run, I tell everybody we're TSA for food. So when your suitcase goes through The x-ray machine at the airport and the guy is sitting there at the screen inspecting it. That's what we're doing with your case of food. We're trained to do that. We're doing it that slow. You know, we can see it at point eight millimeters or less. So if you want to get different results from the same environment, you're probably setting yourself up for failure. So, so what is it that helps drive companies to say, we are like, let's use a third party like FlexRay because we know there's certainly challenges. Is it because, and there's going to be expense with it, but there's also this one, like we're not effective internally potentially of doing it, or we don't have the capacity. Is it sustainability? Like, what do you notice about these companies or leaders that say, we're going to, we're going to look for some additional help? You know, it totally depends on different situations and different companies, but sustainability is huge. You know, can we save product? Can we send good product still to the customer? How fast we can get your stuff inspected so we can do a truckload in four to six hours. It might take you an entire day to do, you know, part of a part of a line shift. you know, third party results for your customer is going to be probably a lot more substantiated than, hey, we hired Freddie to come in on Saturday and watch the, you know, the line and we're not confident in the results. Again, customer reputation. And then usually we see an ROI of you know, eighty to ninety percent of what the customer value of the product is. And so if you can save that much product, let's say you have one hundred thousand dollars of the product and you get to sell ninety thousand dollars worth of it versus throwing ninety thousand dollars of it away. You know, that's pretty big incentive, you know, financially, you know, outside of all the food safety reasons and sustainability reasons. So there's lots of reasons to do this and at least evaluate if a third party inspection makes sense. But we also have, you know, different technology and we can see a lot of different things that perhaps your inline machines can't or your metal detectors or magnets or those things can't find outside of metal. And we do have beyond extra, we have CT technology, which is actually three D. And so we've had a lot of luck doing gaskets and denser hard plastics and things like that. But outside of that, we also see glass and rocks And metal, of course. And so there's a lot of opportunity for us to get your sample in and let us tell you what our capabilities are versus you just assuming we can't see it. So as you're saying all those things, it reminds me of when I was on the hospital committee board and we talked about people getting scans. And I was amazed how often they talked about people who were like, I don't want to know that information if you did the wrong thing. scan on you. It actually made me think, I'm curious, how often have you run into people you're like, I don't want to know all that other stuff? Or you're like, surprise. This is me now. We often find things that you are not expecting to find. good companies want to know that information because they want to make good decisions other companies may not want to know that um it again goes back to my history of the micro world um don't have a environmental monitoring program if you don't have things set up to react to the results you're going to get or you don't have a plan when you when you get a positive because it's not it's not if it's it's when and if if you're not getting it then you're not doing your job you know as not doing your your environmental monitoring program justice because right there's something there somewhere and if you're not getting anything then you're not digging hard enough um but same thing with for material if you're not prepared to get the results you know um we can talk you through some of this but i had a pet food customer that um they were looking for metal and we found rocks and we found a lot of rocks in it turn into a much bigger situation than they anticipated. Um, and it was a little bit funny because my FSQA friend, she called me and she said, I have to come down and I want to watch inspection because operations has decided you've went out to the parking lot to wash rocks off and send them to us and say that you found them. So when we, when we find something, we give you a report that shows all the foreign material we found. So if we're looking for metal and we find bone, you're going to get all the results if, if, and we'll send it to you. So, and she thought it was funny, but the operations people seriously, I mean, thought that perhaps we were finding, not really finding the rocks that we were finding. And so that was, it was funny, but it turned into, you know, instead of two loads of product, like twenty some loads of product. And so, you know, operationally wise, that was, I mean, it came from their grain, you know, so it's totally viable, all the things after the investigation. But yes. Are you prepared for the results you're going to get? just like environmental monitoring or product testing. That is really interesting because you told them something about their food safety culture about their food safety programs that they haven't ever really been looking at at all. They had no idea until they sent you some product and then had to send someone there to just verify because it was so, I mean, they obviously weren't necessarily like honed in on, ooh, we have a major rock problem from the supplier or for this product or whatever it happened, happened to be like, you gave them some insights into that, which hopefully made them a stronger company. Yeah. And that's, you know, our exact push for all of the conversations we have about supplier monitoring and supplier approval. These things, if you're monitoring them, you're not going to catch them all, but is there a way that you're making yourself better by doing this and, and getting in front of it and, you know, evaluating which suppliers you really want to use. What it sounds like, too, you get some really interesting scenarios where you get to observe human behavior in a completely different way when people are maybe caught off guard or in this situation of, well, we've got all this product that we need to send to you. I'm curious, have you noticed anything like patterns of how people respond or the difference between companies who you said, some are, you know, more on the proactive, proactively finding stuff versus people who are not. Yeah. So just, I mean, think about it on any situation that, you know, seems like a crisis, like when everybody's hair's on fire, nobody probably makes the greatest decisions. So, you know, if you go back and evaluate it, you know, a couple of weeks later and say, you know, what could we have really done to prevent this? And again, when I, when I'm talking to people, whether it's, you know, at a conference or in a one-on-one level, when I ask, Hey, think about the last time you had a foreign material incident. And you really start thinking about that. What did that actually do to you? You know, you're talking about, Hey, somebody had to come out on a Saturday. Is it, was that super painful for this person or was it, you know, getting a really, you know, feel like you're under the microscope from, you know, the VP of food safety or the VP of operations and the scrutiny that you got through that, or was it a financial burden? How did that really affect you personally? And then how did it affect the product and the company like after that? Because affecting the product and the company is going to be, you know, substantial to some people but to other people it's just hey that's part of the job and and whatever and when you when you hone in on how did that affect you like what did it do to your job like what extra stuff did you have to do and those kind of things um you see a different response or reaction and if you could prevent that in the beginning then you have more buy-in from them usually Yeah, that's a really good point, right? Because we feel, OK, of course, we're going to have some type of foreign material, right? Or we're going to have some type of thing where we have to throw a product away or we have to spend additional money for external support. But when you think about, but when this happened, how was your day? How was your week? How did this disrupt? you know, the things that you had planned, what did it do to your goals? Like, once you start thinking about that and, you know, for people that have a team, what did it do to your team? And were they able to accomplish things or did you have to push things back because you had this major event happen or you had this event happen? I think those are great questions because a lot of times people don't think about that. We just think, oh, that was an event, right? Like it happened. And then we kind of move on from it versus really thinking about how did that impact us? And I think it just connects back to ultimately culture and leadership, where leaders who are able to reflect in that way, they see different things happening in their culture. And even to Jill's question around people who are even ready for this. Even when something, a fire comes up, people who are ready for it, they're typically ready because they've had some issues, but they've reflected on what did we do well? What did we not do well? What are we going to do again in the future if something comes up? It doesn't have to be the same thing, but if something comes up that puts us in this fire or whirlwind. I think that's a really good point when you talk about clients who have prepared for these things. And I think the other piece of it is the reality is, you know, are you producing a safe product? If your kids or your elderly parents were going to eat this or get this at a restaurant or, you know, after you bought it from the grocery store and made it at home, do you feel confident and safe that you would want them to consume that product? And putting a real story or, you know, situation behind that, you know, your infant child or your elderly parent or grandparent could possibly, you know, consume this product. And would you feel the same way if you knew they were going to get it? Yeah. Yeah. You know, we talked about this a lot at IPPE. It's the whole like, what do we tolerate? Because our what we tolerate is what creates our culture. And if our goal is to champion prevention, how would that look different? And it makes me wonder about, you know, being in the seat that you're in now, where you get to help people kind of navigate through this. When you see, when you see companies that you're working with, like what does preparedness at its best look like? From companies that are like, yep, we've done some work, but yep, we're also prepared perhaps for this crisis where they've done work or they've prepared to be able to do work with FlexRay? Like, what does the best preparedness look like? You know, it's all the things that you're prepared for any other piece of food production for. Like, are your programs in place? Are they being followed? Is leadership setting an example? Is it going from the top down? And then when something does happen, what are you going to do about it? Like, are you going to blame somebody else? Are you going to take ownership of it? After the investigation, the root cause analysis happened, after we get the results from FlexRay, how does that change what you do going forward? And I think it's just that simple and that not simple on all levels, because like I said at the beginning, there's still people involved. you can only you can go over gmps you know tell your blue in the face but things are just going to happen when an auditor comes by they're going to drop something on the floor and pick it up without sanitizing it or throwing away i mean that's just the way the world works you have to be prepared for that right yeah true Right. And the difference between having those things and living those things is really that space of like what we tolerate. Like, are we okay that we're not ready or that we are ready or that we create patterns of behavior to support our programs? Or are we like, yeah, we just pull it out in the crisis. Yeah. I mean, are you doing it every day or are you only doing it, you know, when you have a customer show up or you're getting an audit or you have a complaint. So now you're doing an investigation. So you, you know, making it look good versus yeah, this is the way we just operate every day, doing what everybody is supposed to do when no one's watching kind of thing. Right. I'm thinking about it like if I'm like if I was back in one of my seats in a former role and I'm like, whoa, I need to be more prepared so that I could actually work with Flex Ray in the event to save product and to do those type of things. Like, what would I need to do if I was in that seat going? I want to be ready because I think what happens is like, oh, we have another foreign material incident and we're just going to handle it. And oh, yeah, we should investigate it working with like a flex rate or third party. But until it elevates to the top priority, it probably falls off and we don't. So if I had to be prepared, what would I do? Kurt is going to kiss you for this, Jill, because we have this new program that we're building on the West Coast. it's called fast track. And what it is, is it's really, you get set up to work with us before you have a problem. That way, when you're in the heat of the moment, you don't have to be doing all these things that you really don't have time for. And you're kind of rushing to, to call Jill and call Tia and call Paula to get all this information together so you can, you know, submit product to us. So just to make it real kind of quick and easy, it's, Hey, we'll fill out your, your, you'll, You'll submit all your paperwork to get approved as a customer. We'll run a credit report on you. You can even send us a couple samples. We'll give you a label so you can send the samples in to say, yeah, we could see this in case this would happen. Because we all know that you guys have a library of fun things that you found. And if one of them or a couple of them are reoccurring incidents and you didn't know that we did this, send it to us with a case of product. We'll tell you that we can see it and then the next time this happens, which again, we hope it doesn't, knock on wood for you all, but it probably will, you're three steps ahead of the game and you can have product in a truck headed to us same day versus having to contact us, us get you set up, you send us a sample, we got to wait for the sample to show up, then we have to do the sample testing on it, all those things. So we would love for you all to contact us and say, Hey, we don't want to use you, but in case we do, you know, we're interested in fast track and we'd like to get out the setup and all sample testing for us is free. You just send us what your foreign material is or what you think it is along with a case of your product. And we'll tell you, you know, yes, we can see it. No, we can't. And you know, that way you're set up to, to move forward in the event that this happens and you don't have to be in the heat of the moment to, Um, wait and have people breathing down your throat. Hey, is this positive? You know, can they see this? How quickly can we send them, um, sample or the product, you know, on the trucks, when can we still get it to our customer? All those kinds of things. It alleviates all that decision-making that you're trying to make in the middle of the fire, because the real talk show was about our effectiveness on decision-making rapidly. when we are faced with way too many of them and when they're complex. So we can take that away from an incident and be prepared and I guess fast track. There you go, Kurt. But I think that's important to know otherwise a service like this seems, I'm gonna say kind of out of reach because we're not ready to actually say, yep, we already know everything involved, so. And Paula- I would have known earlier in my career. Yeah, and Paula, if someone's like, ooh, yeah, I wanna be a part of this. Do you all work with product that is ambient, refrigerated and frozen? So everything we work for all we work through all types of food and we do have some other like cosmetic and different things like that where we have customers that use those kind of products, too. But we operate just like a plant operates, except if you come visit us, which we always welcome, it's much cleaner and slower paced than anybody anticipates. But like if we have an ice cream load, you know, we'll run that across eight lines. like within thirty, forty minutes. So there's no temperature abuse. We do the same things you do in terms of keeping temperature. We take temperatures the beginning and the end of the pallet. We document all this. Everything goes back onto the same pallet that it came to us. So you have complete traceability. We do BRC audits. We welcome customers to come, you know, observe what happens. But you know, essentially we're just an extension of your production facility and just a partner with you. That's awesome. That's awesome. So Paula, I'm curious because you shared a little bit that you've been, you know, you've done quality assurance or QA, FSQA for a restaurant chain. You've been a quality manager. I know you, you know, we worked together at Mary You. You're now in this space. you've gone through a lot of different things. When you look back on your own journey, whether it's leadership journey or career journey, you're getting to this point, like what helped you move from, through this with the ease and flow, or maybe it wasn't always ease and flow, but to get to this point. What would you have known? And I guess the other part is what would you want to have told your younger self or what advice would you give to others? So in the seat that I'm in now and looking back, I think there's a lesson to be learned from every opportunity. I got some pretty hard feedback today. um it was around and i had just got a performance review and it was like stellar like i got a raise i rated i don't know what the rating system was at that time but i rated like off the charts i was doing my job fantastically and my um manager at the time she said paula everybody thinks you're pissed off all the time and i need you to be happier and that's not really my personality like that's just who i am um And so I had to start making myself say hello to people in the morning. I got to work before everybody else. And so I was like, dead in working by the time everyone else showed up. When I sent emails, I'm like, hey, Jill, I need X, Y, and Z. Not, hey, Jill, good morning. How are you? You know, those kind of things. And so I had to train myself to do that. So I would say in that, that was really, in the moment, I'm not going to lie, I was mad about the whole situation. But looking back on it, that's one of the best pieces of advice I could have gotten because I had to um change the way i was approaching things and even though i'm still that's kind of my type a personality i want to get things done i make stuff happen you know whatever it takes to to help my customer or my team or all those things i'm going to do it but sometimes you have to take step back and really evaluate um the situation and what did you learn from it how can you do it better next time that thing and i think in terms of leadership vulnerability is really important and so i share this story all the time with people um that i lead or coach or whatever and then i also you know give other examples at times where Um, maybe it wasn't in the moment, but I look back later and I see, Hey, I could have done this better. I should have done this different. Um, if I can prevent somebody going through a mistake or an opportunity that I've been through, um, I want to do that for them, but I also want them to know it's okay. Like nobody's perfect. Everybody, you know, is going to make, I don't even want to say a mistake, but just an opportunity to learn something. And instead of like pointing fingers and all that, like, what can we do to not do this going forward? When operations comes to me now and they tell me whatever's going on, I'm like, okay, we can't, we can't fix what already happened, but what are we going to do next time going forward to hopefully prevent this again? Or what can we do better to make this, you know, situation less likely happen and those kinds of things. And I think, you know, in terms of making, the environment comfortable to do that. I tell my team all the time, my number one goal is for my team to be successful. And I'm going to do whatever it takes to help them do that and give them the resources. But then it's up to them to take those resources and do what they want with them. But it's in their control. And My second priority is obviously my customer. And I ask all the time, how, how can I help you? Like, you know, what can I do? And then, you know, those two things together make your company successful. So if you're running a number one and number two, then number three just comes naturally or, you know, kind of flows with the process. And so, um, I take great pride in hopefully leading by example. And so I'm not going to ask anybody to do something that I want to do myself or that I'm not modeling to them. Like if I tell my sales team, hey, I want you to send video messages to prospective customers, but I'm not willing to do that, then it has no bearing. Yes, yes. I think when you talk about your leadership journey and how you show up into this space, I know your team feels that. I know you and I have had some conversations around this. And I know your team feels how you show up and how you model behaviors. And you're not going to put them in a situation that you wouldn't be there with them. I mean, people feel that difference. Just like when you got the feedback of, People think you're mad. Show people that you are not mad, at least so that they can approach you. Just noticing that difference of how people respond. We're human beings. We typically don't want to interrupt someone if they're upset or we feel like they're too busy. It just means we're just not going to approach them because they're already so busy. They already have things going on. I don't want to add to their play. So just those small shifts. I think with that too, can you put yourself in the other person's seat? Like, are you coming to every meeting with only Paula's agenda? Like, I only want to accomplish what's easiest for Paula versus what's best for the team or what's best for the whole group or what's best for the customer, even if it looks different than what's maybe easiest or best for you, because probably later down the line, it will be best for everybody, even if it's harder or more inconvenient for you at that moment. But can you take off the Paula hat and put on the Jill hat and say, this is really the best course of action overall versus, hey, this just makes my life easier. And in leadership, you have to do that all the time. And usually nobody even knows or notices, which sometimes is even harder. But you just have to be willing to do that. It's just like being a parent. There's no, there's no glory, you know, from your eighteen year old son that you did X, Y and Z because that's what your job as a mom is versus that's their expectation of you're my mom. So that's why you should do it. Just expect it to happen. It's magic. It's magic. It's magic. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, we've heard a lot today. Paula, it's been so great to have you on because, you know, I think about like we talked about at the beginning, like we kind of frame this as foreign material and kind of the culture around it. But whether it's foreign material or some other system in your food safety quality or even operational culture, like it's feedback and it's a signal and, you know, it does. tell us about the culture of what we tolerate versus where we like to prevent things. And really loved your insights today. So thank you for sharing those with us. Well, it's been so fun and I love you both. You guys are so fun to talk to and whatever. And hopefully, you know, somebody got something out of what we discussed. And if you do have a foreign material incident and you need some help, please reach out. Absolutely. Yes. And even ahead of time. Like I said, I wish I would have known because, man, I was going to keep you busy with all the stuff we had. Yes, that's a brilliant program just to have people set things up ahead of time. Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, hey, if this episode sparked something for you today, you know what? We are going to have conversations like this at our upcoming Leadership Summit. Let me add this up here for you all. It's April eighth. We have a full day with a keynote that talks about grassroots movements because while we want culture to start top down, it doesn't always. But it doesn't mean that you can't have the agency and power to start where you're at. And we have all kinds of good things. So use this QR code if you're here with us on YouTube. And if not, Tia will put this in the show notes so you can. April eighth. Yes, we hope. Yes, and I forgot to say, email subscribers get fifty dollars off through Valentine's Day. So show yourself some love and sign up for it. I love that. And with that, thank you so much for being here with us today, Paula. Truly a great conversation around being proactive, right? That was my major takeaway of how to be more proactive. And then your comments at the end, it made me think about really servant leadership on how do I help support support my teams right how do leaders support their teams in a chaos food industry right we know we have these these issues we're so grateful for leadership like you out there helping the industry um and for flex right that this is an option for the industry it did not exist right ten years ago um that you are able to have the support so we appreciate you sharing some life on that as well Thank you so much. Yeah. So that's our wrap. Leadership isn't a one person show and y'all know culture doesn't grow on its own. It takes intention and systems. So just remember culture doesn't change until leaders do. And we'll catch you at the next real talk. Bye everyone. Bye.
