Remarks on User Safety Assumptions and Key Results

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The Verdenost User Safety Case

The Verdenost User Safety case is built on two fundamental assumptions:

1. Compliance: Dairy production will continue to adhere to industry best practices.

2. Performance (Cost Reduction): Sterilization costs can be lowered—by modifying chemicals and procedures—without compromising product safety.

This is my usual starting point for developing the applied ontology. However, I could have begun anywhere, as long as we are dealing with a system with feedback loops, not a linear process.

(A third assumption I previously registered in Project Enchiridion pertains more to equipment assembly than to dairy production.)

Objective and Key Result

The overarching objective in this case is:

"Comply with applicable product regulations."

The key result is an insurance premium cap of USD 1 million for liability related to product-caused damages.

That’s the basic context: You want to ensure the product (cheese, etc.) does not cause harm, which could lead to reputational damage. At the same time, the company mitigates financial exposure through an insurance umbrella. Management assumes this approach is sufficient.

Governance Considerations

The User Safety Committee is assigned as the Governance Forum, but I find this unrealistic. In my experience, dairies rarely have a dedicated forum for user safety. Instead, safety discussions are mixed into broader Executive Meetings, where boards typically have limited familiarity with the topic.

The Decision Hub: Who Oversees User Safety?

A Decision Hub supervises decision-making processes relevant to its theme, though it is not necessarily tied to a specific organizational function. Often, it falls naturally to the executive closest to the issue.

For Verdenost, I assigned this responsibility to the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO)—a common choice among the dairies I work with.

Key Decision Processes

Two critical decision processes shape user safety at Verdenost:

1. Validation of product and process changes from a user safety perspective, including corrective actions for incidents.

2. Market-side interventions, such as product recalls and other safety-related actions.

From my experience, these are crucial decisions, yet they are often neglected in the food industry, particularly among medium and small-sized companies.

A Bigger Issue Than Risk Itself?

This brings me to an important observation: Recognizing that decision processes are weak is more important than identifying the risks themselves. Would you agree? I’d love to hear your thoughts.