FOOD SURE SUMMIT · ATLANTA · FEBRUARY 2026
What happens in the 48 hours before a deviation
Most preventable food safety incidents don't surprise the people who were on shift. They surprise leadership. Because the warnings were already there, we just didn't connect them in time.
the problem
The brain compresses.
The shift doesn't.
Supervisors managing a short-staffed line, a borderline temperature, a documentation backlog, and an incoming quality check are holding more open cognitive tasks than the human working memory system was designed for.
"Three signals. Three separate moments. None of them individually alarming. Together they're a story. The problem is, they were never in the same place at the same time."
4
Items held in focused working memory under cognitive load
Cowan, 2001
30%
Of critical context lost at every unstructured shift handover
Carter et al., 2009
THE PATTERN
The 5 signals that appear in the 48 hours before
When we look at serious food safety events in hindsight, the same pattern appears. None of these individually trigger an alarm. Together, they form a story.
01
Near-miss reporting slows down, teams become too busy or too fatigued to capture close calls.
02
Borderline readings appear more frequently and get passed through without formal escalation.
03
Documentation gets shorter and faster, log entries compress under time pressure.
04
"We handled it" becomes the dominant language, verbal resolution replaces structured documentation.
05
Small workarounds increase quietly, informal adaptations accumulate without being flagged.
The diagnostic
Four questions for Monday morning
You don't need new software to find out whether this is happening in your operation. Ask your team these four questions.
the free toolkit
Practical tools built on the science
Three resources designed to help you capture what supervisors know before it fragments at handover and make it readable to the people who need to act on it.
tool 01
Structured Shift Handover Template
A field-tested handover format that captures the four categories of shift intelligence most likely to be lost in unstructured verbal exchanges.
tool 02
Repeat Deviation Pattern Worksheet
Walk back through your last three serious events and map the pre-deviation signals. Reveals whether your system is capturing early warnings or only violations.
tool 03
Near-Miss Visibility Audit
A structured self-assessment to determine whether your near-miss reporting rate reflects actual conditions — or just what people had bandwidth to document.
context
The 48-Hour Window: Science Brief
A one-page summary of the neuroscience behind prospective memory, vigilance degradation, and clinical handover research referenced in the Food Sure Summit talk.
What's happening in your 48 hours?
Most serious food safety events aren't sudden. They're the result of small things that nobody connected in time.
Get your shifts together.
